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EPILOGUE

The godly grant of glory in the Gospel ...

It is easy to imagine things. This is one of the great facilities of mankind. One can imagine things that are not, but could be, or even could not be; and seek to institute the one or the other; for such is the opacity which sin has brought to the spirits of the human race, that where not yet redeemed a man can seek to work a violation of almost any foundational reality. Of course it is in vain, of course such ideological jaunts, whether under the pseudo-protective umbrella of philosophy, science, politics, metaphysics or murder, come to grief. What begins in unhallowed haunts ends there.

However the agents may be redeemed. That is the glory of it; imagine ? Imagine being set for snuffing and found in light. Imagine being called to court disaster and having a wonderful success, and then being called to deliverance, and that by the very One whose glory you sullied in the unspectacular errors of self-will! It need not have been deliberate: self-will is not necessarily the same as overt wilfulness.

Some is; some is less so; but it is all one in this. If you drive over a cliff, towering 400 feet above an ocean, with violent waves crashing starkly below the superb eminence over which you proceed at 30 miles per hour, why then the result has much in common, whether you did it on purpose, or when drunk.

Even Christ, when praying for His persecutors, murderers and mockers on the Cross - and it was a continuing, not merely a single prayer, as the tense of the very shows us - asked His Father to forgive them (Luke 23:34), because they did not know what they were doing; but He did not asked something else.

That ? It was that they might be delivered without forgiveness; nor did He for one moment imply that ignorance was sinless. It HAD to be forgiven because of what it DID. And HOW ignorant is murder ? even if by bellicose invasion of obvious facts, in untempered rush, it rubs out reality from before its impassioned eyes. It is ignorant of what it is doing, but not of the preliminaries; and even if it be also ignorant of the import of these, it SHOULD not be ignorant; but when minds are deadened in unbelief, and secure in spiritual prisons, then little of light may be  seen.

Yet forgiveness, for all that, it is absolutely necessary. In heaven, one does not need to say, when accidentally slaughtering someone by a psychic, social, spiritual or moral mistake, Oh, sorry and all that, don't you know!

It does not happen there, for all evil is excluded, with its causes, the sins of man (Revelation 21-22). The spirits of just persons made complete is not like that.

If one wants less than perfection, then one is most welcome to such a brew. Christ told us to be completed, as our Father in heaven is, at the point of righteousness with no premature, immature or inadequate areas (Matthew 5:48). It does not happen here, to be sure, but it is the objective, and this is to be SOUGHT!

It is not nearly enough to seek to be fairly nice/good/reliable and all that; it is to be PERFECT and complete which is the aim. Otherwise, one would have the unpleasant aspect of being perfectly willing for a bit of sin. It is one thing in some one matter at some one time for some reason to fall, slip or err; it is quite another to contemplate such things as an AIM or criterion of conduct.

A typist may make a typographical error, and be ashamed, but not amazed, merely somewhat mortified; but if the typist smiled and giggled and said, Oh well, it happens, and it is almost a bore, but so be it. One tries, you know, one tries! then one might well have some reservations.

Error is not a laughing matter, nor is its occurrence a small thing. Righteousness has relish. Failure in the aim and the passion for reaching it may, when aborted,  be compared, in more nauseous but realistic terms, with that of a military commander. If he loses two of his soldiers through what was frankly not a very bright movement, oh well, there are a million others, and percentage-wise, the loss is small, good for learning and all that ... if this is his thought, it is hideous.

If he turns for another sherry, before dinner, and reflects on his great successes, in stark contrast to this little slip, and congratulates himself that he is far above Smith, whose errors are legion, then one has much more than reservations  about him. Where is the conscience, the commitment, the passion, the purity of intention, the sensitivity to failure, the address to victory in all phases, with concern and conviction!

Sin is the enemy of righteousness, but joy it is to the just to work justice, or if you want it more idiomatically from Proverbs 21:15, It is joy to the just to work justice.

The  same kind of scrutiny is indicated in the  Sermon on the Mount, where Christ exposes the fact that to look with lust on a woman is adultery (Matthew 5:28). It is the spirit of the thing which is critical in morality, godliness; for after all, GOD IS A SPIRIT (John 4).

When, and only when, there is repentance leading to life, to salvation (II Cor. 7:10),

	not shallow, but excavating all,
	not pseudo-spiritual, contemplating much, but godly, seeking God at any cost, His standards and His power,
	moving man to seek them with joy and relish and commitment:

then is the stage already surely lit with a divine light. It is the Spirit of God who convicts of sin, righteousness and judgment (John 16), and there is nothing in man to reach such totality of purity in seeing the wrong and addressing the right.

What makes the sin deadly is DISBELIEVING IN CHRIST (John 16:9, 15:22ff.). If I had not come among them and spoken the words, done the works which no one else has done, Christ indicated, they would not have had sin.

That is, in the context of JUDGMENT, the crucial point is Christ, and when HE is exposed, as He was in the incarnation, God as man, and one does not BELIEVE THIS, and hence Him (John 8:58), then of course one is automatically dismissing mercy where it may be found (Isaiah 55:6, Galatians 1:6ff.). Since God is who He is (I am who I am), and not another, and His offer is His, and there is no other (Acts 4:11-12): then one may move to idolatry, serving one's own so brilliant thoughts, conceptions or convictions, or to God, serving Him according to His word, rejoicing in judgment, because it is now passed BY HIM ONTO HIM, who came for this purpose (Isaiah 53:6).

It was not so readily accomplished. What of a prince leaving the court and palace to be imprisoned by murderers, stinking in heart, reeling in unrealism and brash in beer, in the midst of a crusade: such a prince would be in lush clover and content, compared with the anguished suffering of the Eternal Word of God. Thus He came in the first place, not to a degradation of degree, but to the ultimate:  to the limitations of the flesh from the lordship in eternity, and having shown all mercy, goodness, kindness and truth in its bases and strength, He was then repeatedly receiving mockery and scorn, and directly or indirectly collecting blasphemous attributions of blasphemy and condemnation for telling the truth.

Even that leaves out the fatally horrible part: to be of such incandescent purity that truth finds in Him its nesting place and foundation, and then to have to bear sin, albeit vicariously, nonetheless experientially, even for such as mocked (in cases where these repented): this would be a matter  of infinitude!

The godly grant of glory in the Gospel in enabled when repentance is wrought by the Spirit of God in the erring heart (John 16 - and there is none sinless among men, but the Saviour Himself, who BECAME a man for the purpose of our salvation - John 3:16-17). It may be found when faith itself  is brought to the sickened soul, while regeneration is worked, even the washing of regeneration and the renewal of the Holy Spirit (Titus 3:5ff.).

It is then a transformative grant. It is not something to add to your pet collection of nice things. It is not something you visit every Sunday, as a mini-pilgrimage. It is not a matter for kindly reflection as one works out one's own religion and makes one's own christ (on which pseudo-pleasant pastime, see II Corinthians 11, and the assessment of it).

It is a matter as rigorous as any set of rules. The rules do not save, for it is free. But if you are given an anti-biotic, which upsets the stomach, and you may decline it for that reason: then you are not delivered by that means.

With the Gospel, there IS no other means. If then you have reservations, this is not faith. If you have faith, it is in God Almighty, made manifest definitively in the flesh (Hebrews 1), in an incarnation SO THAT the one incarnated is the Son of God (Luke 1:35), whose ways have been from eternity (Zech. 12:10, Micah 5:1-3, John 8:58). To the Lord, there is none to be compared (Psalm 89:6ff.), even in heaven, and the whole category of the 'made' things, it is in His hand, His product (John 1:3). If one is looking to Him, there is neither barrier nor qualification. In this case, there is no place for reservation, and every misgiving if yielded to, is simple unbelief.

The way, it is hallowed, and the NAME of the Lord, it must be hallowed; and the result is not only taught, but wrought; for with God nothing shall be called impossible.

It is then, in receiving the gift of God's righteousness (Romans 5:17), gratis and holy, and repenting of sin (godless and grating), and setting one's active trust in Jesus, the Just One and Prince of Life and its Maker (John 1:1-3, Acts 3), whose kingdom shall not end (Ephesians 1:10, Daniel 7:25), that one finds life; for he who has the Son has life, and he who does not have the Son does not have life (I John 5). Indeed, then one already has eternal life (I John 5:11ff., John 3:15ff.).

There are no fuzzy edges, through interference effects in the gift of light. One is reminded in Luke11:34-36 of this fact. Here it is, as in the Berkeley translation:.