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CHAPTER 9

DRIFTING IN DAZE AND WAYS
EFFUSIVELY DIFFUSE

Creation and Salvation, Words and Works

Some years have passed since the setting of Ch. 8

GETTING DOWN TO IT

Daddy I saw that chapter title.

Did you dear ?

Yes, what on earth does it mean ?

A daze is either a day-dream sort of wandering of mind, or the result of a blow to the head or something like that. In some ways, they are alike.

What about effusive ?

It means that it spouts out in a jolly sort of way.

And diffuse ?

That means that it goes all over the place.

So if it is what you say, then it is as if it gushes out and then goes all over the place.

It is in the sort of field where it can do both at once.

I do not think I should like that.

I don't either, Sally.

But what spouts out and goes all over the place, and is rather like concussion daddy ?

Well, there are two things that I have in mind. One is the matter of the creation, and the other is the matter of salvation, or if you like, people's attitudes to God when they spout out of place, and then go all over the place.

Daddy, my teacher said that God made the earth ...

That's an improvement on much diffuse talk.

But not in six days. He says he believes the Bible too.

Does he ? Well that is exactly what I am talking about, but it is a little old for you. Ah! here is Rupert, you 'teen age whiz-kid.

Hi dad!

Rupert, Sally was talking about creation in six days.

Yes, I heard you, polishing my car.

Daddy ?

Yes, Sally.

If the Bible says that God did it in six days, what is the trouble with that ?

Nothing Sally. People often do not have the least idea of God's power or of how in the world, or better, out of it, God managed to make it all, and like to imagine that it made itself or that He had to take a long, long time.

We talked about some of that last time, daddy, and it is as clever as stealing cars.

Yes, we saw that. But as to this six days thing, and believing the Bible, and not six days, and all that diffuse, effusive stuff, let us think for one minute.

Will it be much longer, dad, for I have to finish my car before Mabel comes over.

GETTING ON WITH  IT

Not too much. You see in Ch. 2 of Genesis, we are told, after hearing of the steps taken in Ch. 1 to create the various items in and around the world, in terms of kind, such as sun and moon, stars and oceans, sky and light, dry ground and botanical and animal creation, and the kinds of these things; and we learn about their continuation in kind, and about what has happened.

Yes, it is a recapitulation with specialisation, wouldn't you say dad ?

Yes Rupert. The Bible from the first, when the stage is MADE, proceeds to have it SET. On it, appears man, and then in him appears sin, and then for him appears salvation, in Genesis 3:15, first announced. Then you proceed to judgment in Genesis 6 and soon hear of the rainbow, to show that there would not be a flood like that over the earth again; and after uncovering the movement of peoples, it comes soon to the next narrowing, in Abraham, and then to the promise of salvation further, in one of the descendants of Abraham (Genesis 12), who is this very special one to crush evil under his heel who appeared in Genesis 3.

Yes, I was reading about all this in your Barbs, Arrows and Balms 17.

That's so. Well the point here is merely to notice this narrowing process, as the account, the Genesis record  moves on  to what is nearer and nearer to us, in our condition and our need, the account covering judgment and deliverance in rapid succession. In one sense, it goes on swiftly to more and more about salvation, from animal sacrifice to massive predictions of the Messiah, who is to be sent from heaven (Isaiah 48:16, Micah 5:1-3), and come as men, to replace animal sacrifices (Isaiah 53, 66).

But daddy you are becoming too diffuse!

Shut up Sally, that is not courteous.

Nor is that, Rupert!

Sorry, Sall, but you don't understand.

Oh, I know, when I am older ...

Young ones, let's get to the point.

Yes daddy, is it sharp ?

You are, my little Robert!

Sharp points break easily don't they daddy?

Robert is not a point, dear. But let us to the point, and make it sharper.

Yes daddy.

In Genesis Ch. 2, it tells us that this is the record, the report of the "heavens and the earth when they were created". This is the way that they were put into the day.

Doesn't that mean that it is not in some other way dad ?

Yes Robert. It assuredly does. If I itemise to a class in the laboratory, after an experiment in which the thing is set out, that this is the way in which it is done, and put it on the board as a record, that this is the account of what happened, then I assuredly do not mean that it happened in some other way, do I ?

But it wasn't an experiment, dad.

No Rupert, it wasn't; but it has this pertinent point in common with one. It is TOLD in detail, and then SUMMED in overview. The EVENTS are what are told, and the words are what is said, and the words are said to be a report.

Daddy, just imagine saying that they were made as the account says, and having the account say, day one, evening and morning and all that, and on and on, with this rigid formula, and then trying to make it mean that it was really something else, like pink stockings.

Come off it, Sal, it is not quite as bad as that.

Not quite, Rupert, to be sure, but in some ways even worse. It does not, indeed, say that what it really meant was pink stockings, but it DOES say, this sort of view that Sally seems to be reacting to, that it is really not at all what God did in a construction exercise of creation, which is what we find in Genesis Ch. 2, but rather a few insights into elements of significance in what He did.

What does that mean dad ?

Oh Robert, it means that they try to tear it all apart, and say, NO, this is not the way He did it, all this reference to time, to days one, two and so on, is not to the point. It is really just a few stimulating, or interesting parts of what he did or vague and 'diffuse' ideas spun out.

As if someone were saying, the car was created. In day one, in the evening and morning, the chassis was set up, and there was a movement on the chassis, to invest it with other parts, and so on; and on day two, there was a darkness, since it was misty, so we turned on the light ...

And then someone else says brightly, Oh I know what you mean. You mean that there was no such setting out of the chassis, or darkness needing light, which you then turned on, so that you could see, and so on. Actually you are telling us how important is the chassis, and how pleasant light is, in some general sort of way, and all the stuff about numbers, mornings and evenings is just for relish, or confusion, or some mixture.

Yes Rupert, that is quite right. It shows how far people will go to marry off the word of God for convenience.

Is it like Maureen, daddy, who said she just married Mark for his money.

In what way, Sally ?

Well, is it just USING what is there for some other purpose, and not really following the point of marriage, in loving him and so on, just skipping that.

It is, in a way, yes Sally, and that is perceptive of you.

What does that mean daddy ?

It means that you are seeing the point.

LOOKING AROUND IN  IT

But dad, when Ch. 2 comes along and talks about this being the report of the creation in the day God created, and then, as if to make the point so that a mule could not resist it, even if it could and would, states that God rested on the seventh day and set it apart as a testimony, or evidence, or signal or sign, a holy thing, since He DID then rest after such a creation: it becomes mere contradiction to forget the number. If GOD says it is holy, this day, how can man say it does not matter ?

Right Rupert. HE set it apart, the day of rest for man, as holy (everything is holy in HIM), BECAUSE He rested on that day. It was not on the eighth or the fifth day, since on those days, this was not the rest day. Why ? It was because on the fifth it was not finished, so how COULD He rest, and on the eighth it was past the time, so why would it be 'holy'!

Dad, if it were not really what it says, this day and that in ordinal number, with the seventh following the others, how COULD it be that the seventh was made holy BECAUSE of the REST He had!

It  couldn't Rupert. Otherwise it would be a lie. It would intimate that God rested on the seventh day, since this was a sort of symbol of the general idea of rest, just as the actions of the other days were in some way some sort of symbol or suggestion or bit or piece of something that had something or other to do with something in creation. It would make the whole meaningless entirely, a tedious piece of tired witlessness.

Does it mean, then, this funny view, that it is as if God in one evening and day, didn't actually DO what it says, but did it or something else at some other time, or in some other time,  and so on, until on some day, whatever it was, he actually finished, and the seventh day was a rest because He ran out of bits He wanted to talk about, for some reason or other, and so dressed it up as if he he meant that day one was the time when He did what He said He did, and so with the rest ?

I am afraid so, Robert.

Then if there were only six parts or pieces or points to be made, and when God ran out of things to talk about, He stopped, but didn't really mean that He did what He said, or did it when He said that He did, how is it a record ? And even if for some odd reason, ignoring what actually happened, He talked about this and that, linking them together in ways in time which are quite misleading, since it is assumed that He did not do it in time like that, in that order, why would the seventh be rest ? He could have talked about ever so many bits and pieces. If they think, It is just that this is the sort of stuff that was involved in His work, and surely that covers it: then why is this SORT of stuff limited to six, and why is the seventh day so important ? It would not really be rest following creation, but following a misrepresentation of creation, a pretence, and some talk about bits in times that were not the real ones, but wandered about all over the place.

That would be misleading. It would be meaningless. It would make His rest as pretended as the rest of it all, on such a fairy sort of view.

Why fairy, Rupert ?

Well, if HE did not do what He says, if His power did not act as He declares, if His program did not work as detailed, and if the ACCOUNT, record, report as stated in Ch. 2 is not of what occurred, and if His rest is not because there were six actions requiring labour and inducing a time for rest, then something else makes it all stick together. If it is not God, then it is not good enough to get it done, and this is to use fairy ideas, something or other ideas, and is very like the rest of those who want things to make themselves.

I can only agree, Rupert.

Dad, it SAYS God made the seventh day holy BECAUSE ON IT, He rested from all the WORK He had done, not from all the IDEAS which He put forth as IF He had done the work in that way. It is not figurative but fictitious to make what He has plainly declared in terms leading to the common day of our lives now, such as we now use, to imagine that He is talking in gnostic stuff, mysterious galas, and really meant that He did NOT do this but something else which people can argue about, in other times, which disputants can likewise imagine, with no settlement in sight, as is usual when you are neither honest nor straightforward is listening to someone's account of an event or series of events leading to the result we have^*1.

Rupert, you have it.

It is rather like saying, this is an account of your recent purchase. We met and had coffee, surveyed the car, had explanations of its running, investigated insurance questions and settled on $8990 for it; and then having people question whether it meant livres, or minas in the case of dollars, despite the country concerned; or that it meant that it was automotive dreams that were intended, and the car was a symbol. Then when we hear that the customer drove off, and that it why he marked that day in his diary; but these gnostics decided that REALLY, it was meant that he felt a certain psychological satisfaction with the conception of car, and that his psychic forces no longer were activated, so that he could now think of something else.

Yes, Robert, it is true. It is all in the language of event, the presentation of event in explanation of actuality, in the known language of the reality which is our world, seen in construction, reinforced with the sub-structure of diurnal reality, days, even to morning and evening. The seventh of these is marked out arithmetically, since on that day, the other six were done, not the six aspects, but the six jobs. When it says 'By the seventh day, God completed His work which He had wrought', it does not mean that it was NOT by the seventh day. It actually means that six works having been noted, one day for each step or program, then on the seventh day, these jobs being over, God rested.

It is so clear that the idea of making it six ideas about what happened, or six non-evening, morning days, something odd in the realms of epochs or thought-world time, where despite the prosaic reality of step by step construction in ordinary terminology, are to be found fairy talk, words for the birds that fly in philosophy, is really more than intrusive; it is abusive.

This makes evening and morning mere traps for the unwary, who thought he meant to use these time units with the same obtrusive straightforwardness with which all else is noted, that same practical mesh seen in all else, the same progressive, processive, lab book style account that all the rest has, and took the self-styled account to become a non-account, but rather a sanctified day-dream, so that NOT THUS were they created, and NOT AS ACCOUNTED was the reality, the author a nit. This of course simply contradicts the statement to the contrary, the language of time, the series in order and the summit for rest in the seventh, not from His TELLING US, or sharing imaginations, but from HIS HAVING DONE HIS WORK in terms of the account given. After all, if you wrote a book in a thousand years, it is not remarkable; but if you did it in a day, or 6 days, we would be looking for your rest!

It could not be an account if it were not what happened. It is as simple as that.

Yes dad, but someone told us in school that it is just silly to talk about the seventh day, since there has been nothing created since then, in this sort of universe construction, so that it is not really a 'day' but endless days. Why then rest on it ?

It is strange, Robert, how peculiar are the words which come when people grow restless, and just drift away from an account which speaks in days, crowns itself with a rest day in sequence, and then SAYS that this the account of what God did, not some sort of talk about aspects of it, or loose scrabblings about things, including time or series aspects which He did not DO or did not follow, gross distortions of actual slowness, lacking the arithmetical intimacy described for the system!

PATRONAGE OF GOD IS FOR PARANOID, PRETENCE, PRETENSION OR PRIDE

How patronising can this mankind, made by GOD in HIS image, become about His linguistic powers, accuracy of report and meaningfulness of statement about HOW He has done things. It is imagining this god had Altzheimer's disease, and is only one small step from old-fashioned liberalism. Perhaps some merely yield, like an aneurism in an artery, at this one point, being propagandised by evolutionism to the point that thought is painful; but the style of thing is an atrocity against actuality told by the Maker, and summed as His account.

As to this odd idea you got from someone or other, the one about the stopping that goes on stopping and so makes the actual seventh day rest a mistake: no this does not apply. If I work for six days, and rest on the seventh, and go under a willow tree by a river, and sometimes drift off into the waters, and sometimes read, and am so happy that I make a note and a tradition in my life about this seventh day, then there is nothing to do with whatever days come after it, in my little celebration of my so beautiful rest day.

If indeed I never do such things again, or not for a very long time, then the number SIX is that of my work, and the number SEVEN is that of my rest, and that particular six is the special set when I DID it all, and that next day is the special day when I stopped doing all of that. Days AFTER that really have nothing to do with my performance and rest set at all. It is a two phase cycle, and the second is being commemorated, that is all.

They are completely out of it. After that, it is just the arithmetical recollection. When GOD is the one who labours and then rests, then there is this special arithmetical SIX for the days in which He DID as Genesis 2 tells us. In each of these,  He DID (not talked about something other than what He actually DID, some concoction or imagination), wrought, worked, laboured; and then there is the arithmetical SEVEN, always to commemorate or note what happened next, namely that He rested. After that, time goes on in the creation made and has NOTHING to do with this special period of creation, or the interaction of the two-phase notation, work and rest. God has told us to use this account for the construction in our own lives of continual modes, six and one, as we do our little works, which do not start the universe, rest from making it, indeed do not make it at all, but merely use what is there.

Naturally, being GOD, He is able to make our whole WEEK to be built on this, so that, to show us HOW He did it, to remind us, and to show us how apt it would be for us, in companionship and made in His image, to rest on the seventh day too, He legislates this in terms of His own creation of all, including ourselves. Thus TIME in HIS case becomes our CONTINUAL message of that marvellous week at the first. It constantly comes in little groups of seven, for us non-universe creators, who sub-create in the finished thing;  and it as constantly reminds us of creation, that you do not do six ASPECTS of your work, but six DAYS of work, and then rest on the seventh day, not the seventh WAY! Nor do you do six thousand years phases of work, and then rest on the seventh thousand, as you would long since be dead in this world.

All this is symptomatic of the fact that people now, not only in this, but in whole species of approach to numerous biblical topics, ignore what is written, try to re-wire it, reconstruct it, 'interpret' it by contradiction, like the most patronising of uncles, dealing, with deep regret, with some nephew unfortunately born   ... uh, challenged in intelligence. The sheer presumption of this parody, when they deal with their Creator, is all but unspeakably absurd; and the sheer pretension of thinking so to think His thoughts over for Him, in your own lingo and philosophy, when He TELLS us that our thought are not as His, and that we had better LISTEN (Isaiah 55, Mark 9:7) becomes an invitation to ... coaching lessons. Alas so many are like this, they will not LISTEN, and His words, they are CLEAR (Proverbs 8), requiring sometimes labour to comprehend in their notable depths, but not imagination to replace them!

Small wonder God was so angry with them when they ignored that actual DAY of rest, in their time; for He had made it like an engagement ring on the finger (Ezekiel 20), and pointed out that they had broken it. He called it a part of covenant,  this special agreement that He had made with them: and this became a sort of ring or signal or sign, the day of rest.

Is that why in Jeremiah 17, God said that if ONLY they would stop abusing the actual DAY of rest, not some fairy sort of aspect, but the plain twenty four hour day itself, then He would deliver them, even though destruction was on the way, do you think, dad ?

Yes Rupert, I do. That by  the way, is in Jeremiah 17:19ff., but you did well to remember it. ONLY REST on this day, and how great would be the deliverance. They COULDN'T because their hearts were split from Him, but it would be a simple exhibition of grace, not some confused or odd thing; no, it would be childishly simple.

I always am hit by the amazing way, despite all the certainty of ruin, God could say, Just do this, just do this! It reminds me of you, when I was little, saying, Rupert, this is too bad, but just come and tell me that you were careless, and get his done and we will forget all about it. It was fatherly of God to say that, and it is this which I love, for He is always willing.

Yes it is like I Timothy 2 and Colossians 1 and Ezekiel 33:11 and John  1-3, where God is always willing, always seeking, always ready to act. It is not merely AS IF He were willing to act, just as it is not AS IF He created in some sort of ... what was it ? effusively diffuse way, It is not in some obscure mud that He has hidden His word. It is here and clear and before us as He has always declared it (as you see in Deuteronomy 30:11-18. Listen to this:

"For this commandment which I command you today is not too mysterious for you, nor is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will ascend into heaven for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’ Nor is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will go over the sea for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’ But the word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart, that you may do it.

"See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil, in that I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commandments, His statutes, and His judgments, that you may live and multiply; and the Lord your God will bless you in the land which you go to possess. But if your heart turns away so that you do not hear, and are drawn away, and worship other gods and serve them, I announce to you today that you shall surely perish; you shall not prolong your days in the land which you cross over the Jordan to go in and possess.

"I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live; that you may love the Lord your God, that you may obey His voice, and that you may cling to Him, for He is your life and the length of your days; and that you may dwell in the land which the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give them."

It is as He says it is. It is not "too mysterious". He made it in six, rested on the seventh, made the Gospel in His own eternity, and does not rest in insisting on it, not some aspects, but some ACTIONS which HE DID, not in some fairy way, but AS HE SAYS. He did not as it were rise from the dead, have a concept about it: He ROSE. He did not in some way have anguish, He DIED on a Cross as specified. When will people realise that God creates, execrates, intimates, condemns, commends, acts, tells things in TRUTH, not in some confusion of concepts such as philosophy seems to have for its norm, as men again and again specify the impossible in order to avoid the necessary. There is excuse in this, that their efforts are in vain.

Man by wisdom did NOT know God! (as you see in I Cor. 1:20ff., and that shambles trhat is the history of philosophy, like a dance in counterpoint, avoiding the solution and dissolving in the dark). God however is more scientific than the most scientific, more logical than the best logician, more acute than the best observer, and made all these gifts in us, mere dim reflections of the splendour He has SHOWN in His creation, past all our best thoughts and efforts, in FACT.

How long does it take grown-ups, daddy, to realise that God means what He says, and when He makes an account of something and puts His own name to it as one, and takes a number from it for His own response, that He means what He says ? Why do so many have to put their finger in His wounds, before they believe ? Why are they so abstract and odd about it all, when it is all done in the light of plain day in a way testable and sure, from start to finish, and this record is ALWAYS confirmed in EVERY way throughout the ages.

How long do they disbelieve God ?

FIGURE SKATING AND FICTITIOUS FORMATION

For ever, for some, it seems dear. They talk about 'literal' and figurative meanings.

If I made a car, what would a figurative making be daddy ? What IS figurative ?

Sally, there would be NO CAR if you were just being figurative. If you SAID you put it together in one way, the way that follows logically step by step, and SAID which day was the day on which you did this and that, and actually did something else, after saying, This is the report of what I did, then you would simply be lying; and the logical thing being replaced with ideas, the car thing wouldn't come. You do not need just ideas when you make; you need logical action and actual events. You can have poetry, but if you are describing what you did, you had better not let it carry you from the actual realities, or else forget it. You are just blowing. Words and works go together in accounts of making.

Figurative ? It means that you are just using your imagination and talking of one thing when you really mean another.

Like what daddy ?

Well, if you are talking about the nice time you had at a party, you might say this: I am flying about in a buzz of excitement and hit the wall every time someone noticed me!

What would that mean ?

Perhaps that you were excited and fizzy, and from time to time realised you were getting beyond yourself, and quietened down.

What one earth has that to do with the creation of the earth, dad ?

Nothing on earth, Sally.

HOW could it be figurative ? What is there to be figurative about ? What is figurative is saying that ONE idea is day one, when you rest after six ideas, if the ideas are not the actions ?

Nothing, Sally, it is simply fraud^*1.

How fraud dad ?
 

Well Rupert, we all know when we are talking in imagination and in colourful ways which are mere ideas and fancies, which we bring into things, and we do this when it is clear what we are about, for otherwise people might think we are just wind-bags or mad or both.

We know when we adorn things, make them pretty, and so on; and when we don't. That is, if we are any good at talking at all. When we say, Here is the report of what I did, and mean, that here is NOT the report of what we did, or actually I took 50 years, not 50 minutes to do it, then it is simply lying, not funny or clever: it is like some fuzzy student who does not understand chemistry trying to save the day by speaking a sort of goulash of words, mixing an account of WORK done with a fancy about ideas held and duping the supervisors in an incredibly asinine way.

Dad isn't it wrong to fool about with God's words about HOW He worked and WHEN He worked, and WHEN He rested, like this ?

Utterly.

Why do they do it ?

I suppose it is because they do not want to be ABLE to be proven wrong, and having little faith in this field, make up this delirious substitute as a sort of safe house, where they could live, if the statements of
Genesis 1 were wrong. It is hard to see any other reason for trying to change one of the most precise, direct, clear, unemotional, lucid and staccato accounts of anything, with emphasis on logical development and correlative steps ever made, into a piece of imaginative non-record of non-actions, or a wandering way of almost endless times! It is simply to ADD to what God says, an element that contradicts it; and in this, it is doubly in error. God says, Do not add to My words, lest I rebuke you and you be found a liar (Proverbs 30:6). It is best ...

Dad, you always hate it when I tell Robert that you said this and that, and I have added my own little ideas to it. You say, It jumbles it all up. Be accurate Sally! don't you ? If I had meant what you said I said, I should have SAID it!

Maybe I do at that! You can now see just why.

Dad, you are talking about people drifting. Didn't you say that in Randolf Churchill's book about his dad, The Young Churchill, that Winston was very brave and felt sure that Almighty  God would look after him, often not even feeling afraid, but almost happy in dangerous battles, when he was young ?

Yes, this is what is recorded about Churchill.

Do you think this was just figurative, dad, and that what it REALLY meant was just that Churchill had thoughts about battles that really did not happen, or was in prison for so many years, not so many days, and secretly grew old there, and that it is only figurative when they talk of his coming out in a certain number of days ? Do you think the test to his thoughts, courage and faith entered, and that the account could really mean that it was all quite different, actually different phases of the matter being brought to light, not because they were there, or happened in that way, but because they seem interesting to note as if they were, or as if they came in that way, or as if they were a few days of the thing, not a century or two ?

There is a limit Robert! If you could do that, nothing would mean anything, and to imagine such things, here or far more importantly, in the Bible, simply means that you reject the powers of speech of the person concerned.

That is just unbelief, like calling Randolf a liar, wouldn't it be dad ?

Of course. When you do this to God, you are like a prevaricating child before his teacher, driven by fear, or pride or bluff. However, to do it to God is to make His word null by such traditions of so-called interpretation, actually mere additions and distortions (as Christ said of such 'interpretations' of the Bible, in Mark 7:7ff.).

AN ILLUSTRATION FROM AN EARLY STAGE OF A RECENT FAMOUS LIFE
AND ANOTHER FROM THE ANCIENT LIFE OF A PEOPLE

Well Churchill was 'confirmed' in the Church of England, but according to this book, he refused to believe in any particular religion, but as firmly believed in Almighty God, and felt there was something very special about the way he was being looked after. Once in this book, you see him feeling that if he had many more battles (and he had plenty when very young, before he was even 26), he would turn religious and find meaning in all this amazing business of life and death in such deadly circumstances.

Yet, as far as the RECORD is concerned (see, it is important to be able to know what a record is talking about, isn't it, not something else, but the topic stated), he drifted from all such thoughts back to his own sort of religion.  It seemed to focus on Almighty God and Churchill, and destiny and ambition and all that. He did not actually come to the point of what the Almighty was REALLY concerned about in war, or how He dealt with man. In this way, however he may have ended when older, when he was young, he was drifting into whirl-pools which drag down. It was a deeper and deeper removal from the light of faith and truth and the record of God; and it is not uncommon.

Some people try to mix opposite religions, and really make their own; but at least at this stage, judging by the RECORD (and assuming it true, which seems likely as so much is taken from old letters of his, or his books), Churchill did not do anything so illogical. He simply held his own ideas about God and His almighty power, and His interest in Churchill, though I don't think he wrote a creed about it!

Yet that would leave God without a reason for keeping man in his sins and lies and fraud and attacks on God's own name, instead of just scrunching him up and throwing him in the waste bin, wouldn't it dad ?

Yes, it would. Actually, the record in Genesis is only a part of the ONLY book to have stood, tested and testable for millenia, which speaks of things past and to come, and never changes, however fast man's knowledge may change, whether in 'science' or other fields. It stands superb and finished, like the creation, with the REASON most clear. It is because He wants man to have opportunity to find Him, and because He has PROVIDED a WAY to find Him, and because He has made it EASY to find Him by that way, and because He LOVES the man in His own image that He has made, that He does not destroy man (cf. II Peter 3:9).

Is it like the case of Jerusalem, the offer in Jeremiah 17, dad ?

Yes, Rupert. And like that in Matthew 23:37ff., or Luke 19:42ff., which are but expressions of the point that He is keen that all should turn to the truth as in I Timothy 2, and Colossians 1, and as shown in ever so many other appeals and statements throughout the Bible. Time is of the essence. It is not what He does NOT say, but what He does say. There is a time to create, and a time to spread the Gospel, and there is a time to end the Age, and there is a time to judge. It is all straight talk about life and death, not poetry and pretence. He speaks because not to do so would leave Him face to face with what He did not face; but God does not stop because man stops. He loves and proceeds to the uttermost, before actual judgment.

I read about this on pp. 92ff. in your SMR book dad, and that was short!

Well, people love to leave God as an old fool, though they do not always put it like that, as if He were someone who is not so good at speech, or clarity, or giving a reason, or stating His case, or providing salvation or a rescue operation for man: even though this mankind! it is a race which is mucking itself up, and his world and his space too, fast. Worst, man actually seems to like it, like a runaway horse.

But God knows what He is doing, dad! He knows.

Surely He does, Robert.

But Dad ?

Yes, Robert.

How could a runaway horse be compared with drifting! You must not mix metaphors.

You told him to say that, didn't you Rupert ?

Just for fun. How do you answer that ?

There was lovely picture, called, I KNOW WHERE I AM GOING, and in it you saw amazing photographs, moving pictures of the meshing of two great whirl pools, far out in the oceans. If you were a piece of a boat wreckage, near these, perhaps some miles off, then currents at first not so heavy, would make you drift towards that great and violent movement of clashing waters. After a while, if you get my drift, the drift would become faster; and if you did not wake up, you would soon, if you could feel, be finding that you had up quite a pace. Then ... it would be a sudden dynamic, and you would dive and be sucked under.

That is what I mean. It starts, very often, as in this pushing of other people's ideas into God's word, very slowly. They talk as if it were not ridiculous confusion and incredible seeming presumption to alter the record so. They carry on for a few decades, and then someone goes further, and then much further; and before long, the drift becomes dynamic, and then it becomes a DIVINE DYNAMIC when God Himself, unless you have sought His mercy, may act to submerge your carelessness in the oceans of clashing waters.

SUCH LANGUAGE!

Were you being figurative by saying 'clashing' dad ?

In a way, I suppose, yes. IF 'clash' however suggests the impact and the power, it is a good figure, placing the sense of more material thrust into the thing, and in this way capturing one element of it for thought via emotion. It leaves NO doubt about what I mean, simply direct speech; it merely clearly adds a dimension of emotion INSIDE the clear picture.

However, if you kids had been too dim to understand, I would not have said it that way. If I thought that in this clear account of an event, this report of it, one WORD for YOU,  could not be seen for what it was, although we ALL KNOW the facts about water and water, in masses, enough to realise what is the case, then I would not have used it. Since I know you understand, then I used what I was confident would be fine, and so  I allowed this liberty to myself. It did nothing to confuse the issue, then, only made the clear and constant structural fact to have this simple feature.

Genesis does not use such language in its creation report, however, just as you would expect. Its clarity, simplicity, logical structure, emphasis on time series and characterisation as a report, or account, with the use of the numbers for divine comment later, involving God Himself in further action, is of one kind. The contrast of rest after labour is of the same kind. It is an account. All these things are straight report writing, with no touch of the liberty I took here. And that ? It was a very small one, with no chance of misunderstanding, even then.

If people won't believe God, what is the use of talking about it, Dad ?

Very little, after a while. If they do not answer His word, with His word, it is only THEIR words against His, when they want to make them into what they are not. Terms like figurative are ridiculous, since what is figurative language is not in the least difficult to work out, and the good author who has something to communicate, would never make such a mess as to confuse such points. When God is speaking, it is better to listen; and what insists on adding to or subtracting from it, by his own thoughts, forgets that His thoughts are higher than ours, and who He is (Isaiah 55).

When dealing with God, it is best to take NO liberties, and to use NO fancies. HE makes it clear when He is being figurative, as does any good author; and HE is the author of authors, and the final authority on authorship. As He says, It is all clear to him who understands (Proverbs 8:8),and this it COULD NEVER BE, if we just add or subtract, with no warrant, what we will, by calling something this or that, rather than examining the context closely, all His contexts, all His themes, and considering what is the case. BECAUSE He is perfect, IF you do not move from what He says, and find figurative things (like the case of the rotten figs in  Jeremiah 24) where they are clearly placed, then both agreement and safety are present. It really is not hard if you weigh in ONLY what HE says, all of it, and nothing else.

Meanwhile, that OTHER DRIFT, as with the YOUNG CHURCHILL, the movement from Christ whose religion was placed before him, it is a further step in the same direction. It omits the glory of God from the equation, and leaves God in unclear silence, before a vicious world, destroying itself, one which HE made, as Churchill's idea of God Almighty would indicate. SO would He be imagined to sulk or sit,  while He watches in speechless confusion, indifference or callousness. The idea that some GOOD could come of NOT giving man the key to the power and purity of God, is merely an assault on God Himself. God's image bearers are as easily brought to the light of God without HIS invitation, as is a toad brought to the Queen's dinner party. People so often want to be as good as God, and come if and when and how they please, while they would never give this freedom to others, that it becomes clear that they do not really believe in Him at all^*2.

Sometimes what they thought was faith, turns out to have been mere feeling, hope or the like, and they never actually REPENT. Jesus declared, UNLESS you repent you will PERISH! (Luke 13:1-3). People who play with Christ and do not repent, or play with God, and leave Him a disastrously uninvolved Creator, being themselves far more perceptive and pitiful (which is near the case in Hebrews 6:4ff.), merely make of themselves an idol, and defraud themselves of the truth. How COULD people excel their Creator! They see it all, but He knows nothing; they feel it all, but He does nothing. Even if they were God and He were the creation, this would be a gross caprice even to imagine. As it is, it is inimitable hostility and unspeakable confusion.

As to not believing in Him at all, we saw last time how futile that is, logically! People of these two types, worshipping themselves or their world or their own ideas, self-made bosses, painters who act as if to paint over the work of the Great Master: these will eventually get together, and worship the Beast (Revelation 13).

Dad, do you mean that people who do not accept the Creation as God put it in Genesis 1, are going to hell ?

DId I say that ? No, I speak of DRIFT, which in time can become a DIVINE DYNAMIC. IN this case, instead of the positive divine salvation, it becomes a negative divine damnation. No, there is nothing like that sort of littleness: BUT in the end, someone either does or does not believe in Jesus Christ as revealed in the Bible, does or does not come to Him in meekness as a sinner, does or does not receive His sacrifice in death as payment for his or her sin, does or does not believe His body was raised from the dead, that He is coming to judge, and that His word is truth not for molestation but for practice.

I love to leave to God how He judges, but this is because HE ALONE knows the heart. Best to keep to what He says, if you want to show your love, and then as He says, He will manifest or make Himself clear to you (John 14:21ff.). There is no one like Him, and His power is beautiful, not to save you from suffering, but from sin; not from pain, but from silly spirits; not from troubles, but from foolishness, which deserves trouble.

Dad, it seems that the way where people TALK, TALK, TALK away from what God says on creation, salvation and Himself, is only one more way of passing the time of day away from Him. Why don't they let HIM do the talking, and believing it, do their work His way!

I suppose, Rupert, it is because they do not want to. Remember in Jeremiah 17 ? the offer ? They did not WANT to have it. In Matthew 23:37, they did not WANT to be covered by Him. In Ezekiel 16, God tells Jerusalem that it had erred deeply, declaring of them, you "trusted in your own beauty" (26:15).

They even used the holy food (Ezekiel 16:19) which God had set apart for teaching and worship purposes, in order to worship with it OTHER GODS who are not God (Deuteronomy 32:17-21), bogus surrealistic art forms for human consciousness, like dummies instead of food for the infants! It is like the Romanist 'Mass', that, in that what is divinely authorised and ordained, the Lord's Supper, is here used for idolatry to other gods, with a Christ who died at the last Supper,  since on that view, He must then have broken His 'body' and they literalise what is demonstrably not His meaning, and formalise His function, as if faith had to lose both its wings, and truth had to subside, falling on the streets (cf. SMR pp. 1088Bff.). There too you have a Pope who can have it so in the 'Mass', and even declare himself 'God almighty on earth' (SMR pp. 915-916).

What then in the biblical case do we find ? and what happened to Israel when it sinned in such ways ?

THEN God did two things, He reduced them economically (Ezekiel 16:26A), and humbled them by allowing this covenant-breaking people to find the baseness of having PHILISTINES get power over them, in a sort of reverse cycle of the case where little David by faith, overcame them not only with the slaying of Goliath, but after that again and again. Those who honour Me, says God, I will honour!

Imagine people as grossly idolatrous as Philistines not only having power over them, but detesting their "lewd behaviour" (Ezekiel 16:27). What does this imply of the Philistine detestation of Jerusalem's conduct ? It meant sexual or spiritually promiscuity or both; or having an additional element of seeing people, Israel,  once so famous for their work with GOD, now debasing themselves to their own alien level, to the dirted relics of unrighteousness of their national neighbours. Yes, one of these, or two or three, it is all one in this: Israel was stricken by those she should have corrected, and despised by a people despicable!

Is it not rather like the al Qaida rupture, whereby the most despicable of religions, historically and not a little in the Koran, acting in terms of a blood bathing riot of destruction and intrigue, using a god without warrant, validity or truth (cf. More Marvels ... Ch. 4, SMR pp. 1080ff.), yes or power (cf. SMR pp. 829ff.), speaks in condemnation. Thus they show their alleged hatred of some of the sins where the USA is perhaps even better (that is more debased) than they are, amidst their own idolatries and cruelties. What a humiliation, that the debased decry you! What is a thief whom other robbers denounce!

So now does the USA suffer, that its ways have so fallen, that the last can criticise them, and the dust-clad can condemn their uncleanness; and with such carryings on as in California recently, with the State allowing same sex liaison to masquerade as comparable with marriage, is it surprising!

Thus did Israel in ancient times, and thus do many now: thus does the ogling visitor of spiritual thrill in the place of idols, or the sexual visitant seeking perversity par excellence, to excel if it were possible the very devil. Thus do those who wallow in desire, despise the right and invent for their polished equipment, dull usages, contrary to all design. When they do not receive the truth, they get readily an active delusion (II Thessalonians 2). There are waves and ripples, interactions and breakers, tidal waves in the sea of these delusions; but not wanting truth, they receive in themselves the fitting end of their increasingly dynamic drift.

Why don't they want to take it, dad ?

It is wonderful to know that while we all start as sunk in sin, like bits of boat at the bottom of the two whirl-pools I noted, yet the Lord by divine dynamic can lift us from that position. He does not force us, nor does He let us choose in our own way. He KNOWS us, and seeking all, takes those who relate in His own knowledge, as He realises and understands. In this way, it all depends on Him; but depend upon it, He has shown the DEPTH of His love towards the world, and His desire that each one might be reconciled to Him, and SAID SO (John 3, Colossians 1) in the most fearfully strong way.

His WORKS of salvation and His WORDS, as in the case of creation, agree perfectly.

Do you mean that He loves us all, seeks us all, and brings each one whom He knows to Himself, dad ?

Yes, Sal.

You can’t say HOW God works it out, can you, but you know on what basis He does it because He says so.

Quite correct Rupert. The bases and principles of His actions are all stated clearly, and harmonise like some mighty organ fugue. We saw that in my Predestination and Freewill, or in Tender Times for Timely Truth Ch. 11.

So what is all the argument about ?^*3

People love to argue, making God seem lost to love, or lost to judgment; but He is neither. He says what He means, says it most clearly, says that it is clear (though some get mixed up when evil takes them), says how broad His desire to save is, what He will NOT do, what He WILL DO, and just as in creation, DOES IT. In the end, it is so extremely simple. If you believe Him, it is very wonderful. If you won’t, then calling God a liar, or a dim wit, or implying it, is merely to hate wisdom and life.

That's what it says in Proverbs 8, "All that hate me love death." In Proverbs 1, it makes it so marvellously clear, that not HEEDING Him is as far from love as it goes.

NOTES

*1

See That Magnificent Rock, Ch. 7,   *3, and Appendix, SMR pp. 174ff., Answers to Questions Ch. 8, Ch. 6 above, A Spiritual Potpourri Ch. 9.

*2

A note from SMR Ch. 1, pp. 100ff. is of interest here.

One further element, which follows from the others, is this. If it were felt that God, the Almighty, the Creator had in fact not spoken, not merely would it be contrary to the justice which is from Him, who made all things in their relationships as they ought to be; not merely would it similarly conflict with His truth, by which all reality has an owner and a word. Not only would justice and truth lie dead, while injustice and lies and fraud abounded. (Cf. Isaiah 59:14-15, and the divine sequel in 59:16-19, as to judgment, and Isaiah 51:16 as to remedy. Here the scripture also implies by revelation, and concerning revelation, that to which we have reasoned in terms of His manifest, divine nature.) If, then, God had not spoken, while the world remained as it is, then God would also be insulted by the very thought that He would remain inactive in speech to direct and resolve the problems in His world, leaving in silence the insolence and madness of man, assaulting and offending each one the other.

It is not only blasphemy, that is a misuse of the very character of His glory; it would also be a denigration, a travesty and a direct personal offence so to speak or to think. A problem out of the power of God! a problem in the very world which He created, out of His depth, beyond His scope, when He had freely created all things, the whole set of abilities and of circumstances for all created life! It would be like telling a film star that she had no face, or a financier that he had no funds, or a real estate agent that he would not know a house if he saw one!

The concept that He would be willing, moreover, to let be such folly and filth, such wilful, wanton pain as we have just seen in Kuwait and with the Kurds, when, having a solution, He did not use it, this would be like telling a social hostess that she couldn't care less if her guests starved!

Thus there is not only the metaphysical madness of such assertions, such views, such positions: there is also the moral assault on God which is involved. If, indeed, we his creatures would be amazed at the madness of anyone suggesting such things about us, how much more should we be ashamed even to think such things about God, who gave us the power to think and the knowledge with which to know (cf. Psalm 94:8-11).

A solution He has indeed shown; and man, willing to move the blame for undoubtedly high-level immorality and actual agony, often sustained, onto God, wants Him a dumb dog, lying down and snoozing. Thus we, whom He created, are active, we think, we look for solutions, we can feel the horror of so much pain for others... but He, who made our hearts and our feelings and our moral thoughts in the beginning (however we misuse this equipment, yet it is there, in our hearts, however spoiled, leaving its residue at the worst), He does not feel ? God who made the heart, does He not feel? God who made the mouth, does not speak ? God who made the mind, does not think? To ask is to answer.

We have elsewhere traced the impossibility ontologically, the frank contradiction in having the all-powerful author of justice and ground of truth needlessly allowing flat and continual contradiction, when merely to apply His power removes the problem by removing the people who make it! Now we dwell on the incredible cheek, the irrational implicit assumptions on which any such notion is built.

The solution is
 

	available;
	has been shown from the first,
	predicted for centuries, performed by Jesus Christ (cf. Joyful Jottings 22-25, It Bubbles ... Ch.8, SMR Ch. 6, Repent or Perish Ch. 2, Christ the Wisdom and the Power of God Ch. 8),
	published, proclaimed and preached for thousands of years concerning this same Jesus Christ,
	in the predicted Gospel (cf. SMR Ch. 9),
	concerning whom no one has been able to show even one sin,
	and of whom even Muhammad had to admit the righteousness.

To suggest that God has not spoken when His word circles the earth, His predictions noticeably control the whole direction and character of history, uniquely and utterly, and His Son went to the pain and anguish of bearing the sins of those who will forsake their own: this is to sustain, reinforce and add to the insults of the Cross, the calumnies of Calvary, the madness of the priests. It is to stand, arrogant and upright, in the presence of love, and call it hate or indifference; it is to look, princely and pure, at one's Creator and call Him dumb; compassionate and sensitive (courtesy of being created by one's Creator) and to call Him heartless... this while all the time, ignoring the solution which He has constructed, the sacrifice which He has made, the pardon which is so needed, but so ignored.

What is it like ? It is like prisoners in a prison, cut-throats, immoral and dead in spirit, raging at their victims, buried as a result of their crimes against them. Thus Jesus Christ was made a sin-offering to take the burden, the blight and the bane of sin from all who come by faith to receive Him. But He is not dead, and this insult to the moral nature of God is similar to the studious blindness which also slanders His power, by which His people have for centuries lived, their hearts in His peace and their persons alight with His love and presence.

It is therefore one more sin, that God is so 'sentenced', as C.S. Lewis phrases it, God in the Dock, at the hands of man, His judges. But let us add this: He is being 'sentenced' by those sinners to whom He is offering pardon, who are meanwhile slandering His sacrifice and sentencing themselves. In their hearts, truth is contaminated twice: once by sin, and then by sneering at its solution! For all this, the Bible has provided.

 

As noted later in this chapter moreover (see excerpt below), the business of deciding what truth is, without it, is ludicrous. Anything without a direct revelation from the personal truth, has no access beyond himself or herself, and hence cannot know truth: and that includes all theories about this matter. Hence such people cannot logically contest any position dealing with this arena of truth. If they merely allow that they do not know and add that no one knows, then they are committing this precise offence, truthless and filled with truth.

If however they add that someone may know, but they do not, then the logically necessities are valid in One only who could know, who must be personally known, whose word must be tested, whose failure to act would be an attack upon Him, as a derelict delinquent; for it is useless to pretend that it does not really apply. Death applies. Pain applies. Suffering applies. Wickedness applies to the uttermost. Indifference to the equal uttermost would apply if no action were taken; and again, it is useless to imagine that in the end, it does not matter. In the MEANTIME, each day has its fill of utter depravity, breach of life and its means, its reviling of justice and of truth,  its truancy from right, vile violence against virtue.

ANY ONE DAY without a remedy is an indictment of God Almighty. In fact, the remedy was proposed AT ONCE, on the SAME DAY as sin settled its paranoid presence into mankind (Genesis 3:15).

It is unwise and indeed the utmost in arrogant presumption if derivative man, with unmoored mind, man who does not accept the specific, identified and rationally necessary revelation of God, comes to pontificate on 'truth', on the reality of things.

Will a conditioned or limited man, reacting and being able to do only what has been given him to do, erect himself as a founder of truth, a source of criticism of the God who made his little mind ? Will a cog discuss the design with the designer ? Will a man without the revelation of God, tell Him what it would be ? Will man show God His own mind!

Will a limited and sinful man without knowledge of absolute truth, even as a perspective, say that something is absolutely true, or work on bases and ideas as if they were valid and worth arguing from, when he does not yet have the knowledge of absolute truth, on which to start and on which to proceed: either not knowing God, or if knowing something of that, not believing it; or in any case, not having access to this absolute truth in the mind of God, who speaks when He will, as He will...

The case is hardly improved if man does not believe there is such a thing as absolute truth, while making various statements in which such a property is assumed to inhere, or presumed to be possible! Surely the Primary School student is scarcely guilty in his first beginnings of such enormities, through sheer immaturity, as beset the mind of mature man, through rebellion. (Cf. Chs. 3-4; pp. 292-315, 934-936 esp., infra.)

Will a relative man tell absolute truth to absolute God, without the speech of that God? If man will presume against the thoughts of his fellow man, will he presume also against those of God (cf. Isaiah 7:13, 44:24-26): or will man with a panache of delusive power presume to tele-psychiatrise God, construing by his candle power the brilliance of the thought of the infinite and all-knowing God! Here has paranoia its perfection, here irrationality rules.

After all, if you believe there is no absolute truth, then you propose that it is absolutely true that there is no absolute truth. Man is made for the truth he so often rejects in models which are used as a basis to proclaim it. Hence what appears near to insanity, in such muddles, is merely a SPIRITUAL INSTINCT, like the cry of a child to a mother, and being perverted, it sounds as ludicrous as in fact it is.

Drifting from deity, man proposes many things; but truth disposes of them all. In the end, it is muddle or truth; God or antinomy; a little god who dies, or the Creator who lives and proposes to man the remedy of his life violation crimes without limit or number. The remedy is likewise without limit, both in scope (John 3:16) and in heart (Colossians 1:19ff.). Man carefully preserves himself from this remedy, and in unremedied renegacy, profits not at all from the wonders of this globe, as if dizzy from the spin, because ungrounded on the Rock provided. Seizing his own life and the world without ground, logic, reason, right or point, he merely ruins his own floor, and finds the abyss straight under it.

What would you expect ? That defiance of the Maker of mind would be kind to mind ? that rebellion against reality would have 'meaning' ? that worship of material things would have pith and point instead of inveterate sadness in the end: when worship is not material! Is man to be made a slave by sin ? Certainly, and is already; and only the Saviour who has PROVIDED redemption for each and every one who receives what He has paid, can liberate there.

Man believes in himself, his stars, his unction, his gumption, his own wit or virtue; but it is useless. Without truth, he has no remedy. When he finds the only place where truth validly may be found (cf. SMR Ch. 1), he finds the demand REPENT! (cf. Repent or Perish, Luke 13:1-3). He flees to something nicer, like the sects, and for a price, they give you hopes and so forth, minus logic, truth, the Bible, Christ or liberty (cf. Things Old and New, Chs.   9,   10, Epilogue, Appendix). Or else he runs to the surreal, expecting some private equation without generic public proclamation, as if God were dead to reality, and not its source. Or instead, he runs into the word of God, and seeks to re-draft it. To run through the sword of God is to commit spiritual suicide, however.

At first, the man who thrusts himself, perhaps touches the edge, then gradually, as if inured, he tries again, casts more weight into the unmoving blade. It is never hurt; but the same does not apply to those who distrust its sharpness. It is a fact of supernature; and just as a knife, being sharp, is ignored at your peril, so and far more so hear (cf. Hebrews 4:12).

Man in flight from God, he  does it one way; he does it another: all have the same end which have such a beginning. Repent or perish continues its thematic message. Remedy is rendered, redemption is achieved, receipt is required: this is the simple sentence for all from first to last.

It is not the truth which alters by the merest jot or tittle; it must be man.

He drifts, free among the dead. But even the graves open, at the end; even the dead come to face the realities they chided, the Spirit whom they spurned, His words which they ignored, trusting in themselves, their culture, their world, their future, someone's future, in nature, in spirits made or idols constructed.

It is better to HAVE no face than to face that. But the face remains and must face One not at all faceless, though they defiled His face as man when He came, whose mercy came in torrents, whose truth for millenia came in armoured cars of splendour, conducting itself unharmed over the passage of empires, even predicting events, whose Son came to be marred beyond recognition, rather than believed by the nation; just as the nations now do the same, and seem set on making a faceless christ, an unmanned messiah, a mere image of distress, and tempering of the wind, as they tamper with truth and buy hell with their lives.

This is the logical position; the spiritual reality; the human cleverness, the syndrome of lust that measures itself against God, who measured His might into man, that as man He might remedy man's folly and through faith, cancel the cause of his distresses.

Man continues exempted by his will, in fancy but not in fact, following the human desire, and in vast numbers avoiding the divine desideratum. The way is narrow, to be sure; but so are delightful woodland tracks, and paths that wind upward to views glorious and sights embracing (cf. Isaiah 33:17, John 14:21-23, Revelation 7, 21-22). The smog on the freeway makes its speed merely accentuate its lack of sound direction.

 

*3

The ironic thing is this, that

	the enormities of ignorance in which LONG-TERM dating was assumed,
	the question begged like some super begging salesman put into the 'trade' of begging for a living,
	are now being so exposed as to make of them
	not only the gross presumption they have always been, inventing speed, process, conditions, initial case at point of origin, and so on, while bypassing the conflict with the numerous early date indications for the earth,
	but now a mere exuberance of hope, obstreperously demanding
	what it wants, outside all credibility,
	wantonly against scientific method,
	studiously rasping its cant, while the facts refuse the embrace,
	with repugnance to what is so offered,
	as if to squeeze the very life out of them.

The presentation of Dr Humphreys and the multiple openings now evidenced for change in the velocity of light, even vast ones, and the public admission of many to this effect, makes it like trying to decide how LONG it would take to go from Melbourne to Sydney when it is not quite clear whether you would be travelling at 8 or 8 billion miles per hour, or for what part of the journey it would be this or that speed, and what modes of gradation there might be, and whether the roads would impede the theoretical speed grossly or slightly, and at what speed you would start and so forth.

Increasingly apparent has been the cosmological complexity, the series of presuppositions about known and unknown elements of the dynamics, distancing and developments, and these are exposed at length in SMR S1- S34, which deals with many recent developments.

{See also on confused principles, News 57, 59, TMR 1,8, SMR Ch.3, and pp. 159, 315B-316A, 137, 1-50, Repent or Perish Ch.  7, End-note 2, 4; A Spiritual Potpourri 16, 4 Section 4 Wake Up World ... Chs.  2,  4,  5,  6;  Ch.  2 above (the historical  trends, the tedium and the non Te Deum of nescient naturalism) , Chs. 3  -  4 above (the last with much much in free verse, cf. ASP Ch. 9); Sparkling Life ... Ch. 8,  Cascade of Truth, Torrent of Mercy Ch.  3 - and I Timothy 6:20; esp. WAKE 6, Earth Spasm, Conscience Chasm ... Ch.   7;

and on dating SMR 235-251; underlying data SMR 226ff.,  and esp. 244ff.,
S 21-34;  Calibrating Myths ... Ch.   1; Deliverance from Disorientation Ch.  6;  Barbs, Arrows and Balms  15; Wake Up World ... Ch.  5, esp. End-notes 1A and
1B , Answers to Questions Ch.  5 (overview), esp.  pp. 112ff., 116ff., and Appendix, with end-notes 2B,  4; delusive dealings TMR 7, Part E, and End-Note 2 .}

For these cosmological developments, a vast rebuke to those led by winds of false doctrine and the artifices of hope masquerading as science, see TMR, Ch. 7, Section E, with associated references. It is amusing to see how scathing the Lord is to these impious hopes of the ungodly, whose ways, instead of being more and more filled with light, glower with the power of a darkness visible, and a wilfulness obtuse (cf. Psalm 1:4,10-11, Proverbs 1:20-33, 8:32-36).

These things alike, indicate and expose the ephemeral phases of science, man’s knowledge in one particular form, often distorted by desire, imposed on by philosophy, captured by cultural convention, when it moves away from the happenings KNOWN to the reasons imagined, its true course. In so departing, it becomes sci-philosophy, though many do not notice the transition.

In this sphere, often people confuse materialism with science (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7), and contract a spasm of method, so that they exclude the indicated and pretend rather pompously, that it is de rigueur to be blind to all grounds for all events, to formulate and to test, knowing where the answer is to be found, before they look, and finding none, talk of difficulties, argue and profoundly disagree with their naturalistic selves, till the comedy becomes one of exquisite folly, almost like that exquisite British piece, "The Plank" . The mutual conflict of those so misled reaches to the alps of acrimony! It is interesting, since there is no release from their frustrations on their exclusivist assumptions, naturally leading to a high head of steam, and fascinatingly mythical ideas (cf. TMR Ch. 8, Endnote 2, SMR pp. 422Eff.), such as those of Hoyle's spectre (cf. Secular Myths ... Ch. 7,  Endnote 1) and others, seeking now here, now there for what is gratuitously excluded from their arrested gaze!

There is much to test in all of this, and as shown in SMR pp. 140 -151, when tests are without artificial restraint applied and pondered; and there is only one result when the scientific method is employed, not made slave of philosophy, and addressed to the facts, what NEEDS explanation, not to dogma: creation is indicated on ALL points, and evolutionism, on none. This is, as Gilbert and Sullivan might phrase it, a pretty pass; but in truth, omitting the irony of the wording, it is ugly, unproductive and dysfunctional as the noted Scandinavian Professor Søren Løvtrup so scathingly declared of what he terms mythical Darwinianism (cf. TMR Ch. 1, point 11, cf. SMR Ch. 2, Endnote 18, pp. 202ff.). Then the untruthful and repulsive species of imagination, like some migrating cane toad, the travelling desire that wants the made to be the Maker, is to be seen  slithering sightless to incite some new species of ‘investigation’.

The CULT OF THE FORBIDDEN (cf. TMR Ch. 8, Part 4, Endnote 7) continues to make its cultural kingdom to its will, insisting on premises which, like the Iranian mullahs, EXCLUDE what differs from their design for uniformity and authority, by FIAT, simply demanding that the truth be not found for nature, except IN nature, like men who KNOW that it is useless to look for factories; obviously, they say, with hauteur, shrugging their narrow shoulders and eyeing their 'foes' with a specious ocular intensity, cars are their own thing. Factories are a ludicrous invention of the mind.

Not once but repetitively, they have genesis engender itself, whether from nothing, or from matter, or from mind, to find the spirit which man deploys in so saying (cf. It Bubbles ... Ch. 9). Or rather this is their thought type; and it has a surprising following of such misty myopia that one finds here that magnificent confirmation of Paul's inspired word in Romans 1:17ff., about systematic blindness in the human race, the progressive, or if you prefer cumulatively regressive result of not caring to retain the knowledge of God. You can of course do this in either of two ways, by being EXPLICIT and rejecting it outright, or IMPLICIT and inventing gods that don't do what causation requires, mythical bystanders, a sop for the religious on the part of the propagandists of philosophy.

Yet the nature of 'Nature' as an inventor, is as excluded as Macbeth would be from a Primary student suffering from shock, whimpering in a sequestered corner. Neither in its observable powers, not in its excavatable machinery, nor in its testimony of 'products', nor in its coming nor in its going (cf. SMR  pp.  315Aff., 307ff., SMST  Ch. 8,  Of the Earth, Earthy ... Ch. 4, Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch. 9, Stepping Out for Christ Ch. 9) is it willing to operate. It simply does what it is, like all products, and its innards, though interestingly seen in this and that light, are not innard-productive inventors, nor are its interstices creators of the same. They show what they are by what they do, and what they have; and of imaginative concatenation of concepts and codification of such, integral composition of myriads of elements in self-replicating programmatic devices, wrought by adequate causal bases, we see not only nothing, but only the qualities of performance at the level in view, stoutly doing what comes naturally, and doing it very well. They act as they are, lacking the genius for what admittedly is NOT gradual, as Gould so nobly confesses, and so necessarily (cf. Wake Up World! ... Ch. 6).

Science is affronted by this obtrusively persistent insistence that causality is limited in operation to the working of what works in its own confined and ordered modes, and cannot be operative in the domain of making the thing that works, so that it may work.

There just as Løvtrup indicated of Darwinianism, so now in any other arrant -isms which prod the careless, affront causality and squeeze unsweet nothings from products which refuse investment with code-and-assembly-line inventiveness, and omit information production from the fresh and original domains that are attested in the life forms manifest on earth, there is only loss in the pursuit of the irrelevant.

This natural world of objects declines most solemnly to attest of itself  either mouth or mind, or any correlative of the same (cf. SMR pp. 422Eff., 315Aff., TMR Ch. 7). In such pursuit, wasted research funds ally themselves with work; but the results are pre-cast in a cast-iron which cracks so readily that it is hardly worth casting at all. Endless seeming proposals to extract from the inert what is vital, or from life what is formulative of itself, from the product the producer, join their peers in unspeakable oblivion, a fitting testimony to the Age of Confusion. As for the rest, how they wallow (cf. Wake Up World … Chs. 4-6); and yet how readily is truth to be found (Spiritual Refreshings … Ch. 16  cf. Ch. 13).

Truth knows no such limitations (cf. SMR pp. 330ff., 85ff., 150ff., TMR Ch. 8, End-note 7 to Part IV), and when the data are followed ruthlessly to their requisites, only one result obtains, creationism without even any competition (SMR pp. 140-151, Chs. 3, 10). It has neither wrangling nor tangling in its straightforward unique, and uniquely straightforward presentation. Occam’s razor delights in it, logic resorts there, and evidence surrounds it with cries of relief.

Unlike all of these preoccupations with carnal and contemptible pretence and pretension, there is one place where the account does not vary though thousands of years contain the thoughts of men in profusion; where it does not need to vary, though the assailants try every wile they can seize, where the statements stand, for where is their countermand ? Not in ‘Nature’, not in logic, which does nothing but confirm it continually (cf. SMR Chs. 1, 3, 10). The Bible alone in religion is such a book, testable, and one which we are within its pages INCITED TO TEST! (Isaiah 41, 43, 48).

There is likewise ONLY ONE conquering Saviour of man, able to raise the sick to life as He Himself was raised in the midst of the greatest power on earth, wishing the contrary, even Rome, and to the most murderous priestly scheming you could imagine, seeking the contrary, all unable to produce their victim when dead, or to reduce His power when resurrected, surging through the Empire till even its Emperor named himself a Christian.

The word of God does not cease to confirm itself in all directions, backwards and forwards in its survey and forecasts; and the word of man by comparison, in the fields of such expanse, is like a dead gnat fighting an avalanche.

Its ‘interpretation’ is not difficult if you do not ADD and do not SUBTRACT, whether from psychological desire, personal animus, political power hunger or philosophical passion. It does not wed with ANY of these, but interpreted by itself is staggeringly clear, a rebuke to the dogmas of human invention which seek to engage themselves to its strength and to reduce its purity to their pre-conceptions. With God, this is ludicrous, a waste of time, and with man, it is popular, a fashion of passion which whips the world.

It is always wrong both in literary analysis and spiritual prudence, not to say piety, to seek to 'interpret' the word of God for convenience. It is best taken in its own context for consistency, in its own light for guidance. Intrusions make gate-crashing at parties pleasurable by comparison (cf. Mark 7:7ff.). In Isaiah 28:9, God shows dramatically how the foolish conceptions of a godless Age can make its young people almost impossible to teach, its veterans all but inert to truth, so that it becomes almost necessary to take babes for instruction, before imparted blindness seals their eyes, blocks their ears and subdues the light they might have had (cf. Luke 11:52). But God can enter where flesh creeps away; and light can pass through darkness like a meteor.

It is not only Mary of whom it is said, The Master has come, and He is calling for you! (John 11:28).