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CHAPTER  6

POSITIVES AND NEGATIVES ...

CLARITY IS THE BEGINNING OF SIGHT

What is and What is Not

Time to Look Around in the Wisdom of God

OF WISDOM AND ITS WAYS

Resignation is not the point. Anyone can resign. Your spirit is no more in charge ?
Fine, but what is ?

Assignation ? You are then going to assign yourself to something, some passion of the mind, some ideology of the spirit, some discipline of the body ? Perhaps, but remember the seven worse devils which were only to happy to have a more cleansed house to invest with their deleterious presence! (Luke 11:16).

Designation ? You are going further this time, beginning to look sounder, and are going to give some attention to what you assign yourself to find, have, serve or love ? Excellent, but is it right!

In fact, you need not resignation, mere cessation of this or that evil practice, inexquisite concentration, foolish involvement, questionable procedure, but repentance. If your desire is not one more in the permutations and combinations of spiritual thrust, lust or love, but the truth, then having lacked it, you need it. Having been your own truth, whether internally, or by selection of your mere preference from others or something else, you are circumscribed by yourself, and making yourself and your powers the criterion, you are necessarily in a fatuous situation, where only God has the knowledge, limitless and uncircumscribed, the objective truth which anyone COULD have.

You repent in order to seek God ? Best of all, for this is the scriptural minimum (Luke 13:1-3), and the logical necessity. It is not a matter of throwing the psyche around, for what is its power in the end, born in and borne out!

If then, it is not resignation but repentance that you need, if not already in Christ, then no less it is not assignation but asking that is your next requirement. Moreover, it is not designation, for God is not your design, rather are you His! You do not invent God, or assign what is to be or descry God and design what He should be. You do need to seek God and find out what is!

But for what do you ask ? and as what does He designate Himself ? It is as the Eternal God and Almighty Saviour that He designates Himself. Thus, it is this for which you ask: It is for deliverance from destruction, and this with desire, for the Lord, to find Him, to know Him and to be acquainted with your Creator so that you may find out His desire for His design, you! It is to the One who says, I AM, that you seek (John 8::58 as in Exodus 3:14). It is vital to act early, just as it is important to have vitamin D when young to escape rickets.

In asking, it is well to see what He has said about Himself, and for that you need the only book verified by incomparable means and unique testing provisions, as His (cf. SMR, The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy, Reason, Revelation and the Redeemer,  and Celestial Harmony for the Terrestrial Host). There He designates who He is.

You need, further, to find the way He has appointed, for the appointment is His to make, in order to find Him. Intensity is fine; but more is needed. Immensity is desirable, in scope, but it is inadequate from limited beings. You need clarity.

In the Book of the Lord is to be found abundant reference to the Lord of the Book, who was foretold to come at about 30 A.D. (Highway of Holiness Ch. 4) - it was always a very public and testable thing -  and His predicted path was to come and then die in human format for sin, to fetch the spiritually deformed, and sinful of soul back to Himself. The scope for this was the entire human race (Micah 5:1-3, Isaiah 53-55, 49:6, 35:8-10 - the highway of holiness is for the redeemed, and the message is to Gentile and Jew alike), as many as believed and so received His remedy and redemption (Isaiah 53:1, 55). This, the Messiah, came as described in detail and His predicted Gospel of divine grace and favour in the restoration of the fallen by faith to Himself is the ultimate romance (cf. SMR pp.  763ff.), adventure account and a testimony of truth.

Further, this Gospel has from the very first of sin in mankind, been proclaimed in essence, and then progressively in more detail over the preceding millenia, before the divine payment was actually made, to make free the entry to faith, into His kingdom (cf. Barbs 17, TMR  Ch. 3).

If you do not like the implications for such a one as yourself, then this is sad, very sad. Jesus however made it quite clear that He did not come to call the righteous (Matthew 9:10ff., Luke 13:1-3) but sinners; and if we say we have no sin, adds the apostle John (I John 1), then we merely deceive ourselves. As to sin, it is in an exclusion zone for the peace and beauty of heaven, and its kingdom, so that without cover, the sinner stays in that zone; and being covered, he is also cleansed and changed, so that sin does no longer have dominion over him (I John 3:9, Romans 6).

Sin is deficiency relative to the form God made for man, whether descried in ignorance of His will, failure to have known Him all your life, failing to reach the perfection of form He has assigned for man, through mischief of will, clouding of thought, the dynamics of desire, the failure in design specifications. That this,  it is more; but not less. It is failure to please God.

For this, therefore, you need to repent and then ask: not to GET sin, for you have it already; rather to leave it and to become acceptable to Him; and in asking, to ask as He prescribes, removing the old love before being on with the new, and closing in on the covenant of Christ. As to this, it is written ultimately in blood; for though words describe His vicarious atonement (I Corinthians 5:17-21), the means of reconciliation through His death in our place, who believe, yet the payment for sin and the settlement for peace, it is only the death of the Messiah with the resurrection as the authentication of life eternal, which does it. It is thus by Jesus Christ and by no other name that it is done (Acts 4:11-12). Peter knew it, but many who pretend to be of His Church, forget it, or pitch it to the pit, from which it might otherwise have delivered them!

It is the death, then, the blood of Christ who cleanses.

It is however the words which show it; and to Him these are to be followed; for it has been a shocking failure how many either fail to follow His word, or looking at it, fail to DO it. While none on this earth does it perfectly, many make it a policy NOT TO do so, and more imagine that living in the masterful grip of known sin is some kind of concession. Not so - Romans 8:10-16, for while, like an orange tree, you may have black or red spot and so forth, yet there is a spray for that, and while again you may need much work to keep you clean, yet it is not in vain. How, asks Paul, shall we who died to sin live any longer in it! (Romans 6:2). The results of actually coming to Him by faith and participating in His atonement by faith are not of that type.

Thus in John 5:39ff., He makes it clear that many actually go so far as to search in the Bible, but do not COME TO HIM. That is what it is pointing to; for it is like having a Global Positioning device, and seeing clearly where you are, yet failing to let it lead you by Satellite Navigation to where you are to go! It is in vain, a show, a device but it has no dynamic unless it is taken as it is.

What is the use of contemplating such knowledge, if it be not applied! You may then KNOW where you are, but not go where you desire! Some gain...

Thus it is not in resignation, assignation and designation that you aptly and adequately proceed, but in repentance, asking and seeking by faith and its confidence,  deliverance from destruction, and doing so with desire for the Lord. It follows that it is not to SELF-BELIEF, that ogre of the sports talk, that you move; for this is mere projection of yourself from yourself for yourself (cf. II Corinthians 10:12), a chain! What is needed is flight to the finish, where the work of redemption is complete in Christ, and liberated, to live in Him: not bondage to the start!

You  may recall the book, John Livingstone Seagull, which had a vast appeal. Why ? It was because it saw through the clammy culture of second hand traditions and rigorous conformity to the base, the inadequate and the unsplendid, surging instead to look for the brilliant, the different, the novel, the innovative, the excitingly resourceful, the developmental, the whole domain of adventure into what is worth while.

That much had something to commend it. However, it became clear, as the seagull which was used symbolically to declare these things by FLIGHT manoeuvres, had no actual resting place. It was all more, more scope and capacities, always trying, never finding what it was all about. It involved  increases in aeronautical acrobatics and navigational skills, but nowhere actually to reach. It was all about going, not about  finding. It was a process, not a peace. It was journeying, not finding. It was seeking in a milieu of principles of performance, instead of finding the point of this or any other technical skill, the wisdom of the way and the plan of the living.

It was liberation in the interests of bondage, a new bondage, that to skill. Skill has its points, but it all depends on the objective and capacity of the skill. To make money, it is a skill; to make peace, it is another, to make war, it is a third, to make haste, with speed, it is another. To what however are they directed ? That is the question, and the answer, as for the beginning of creation, so for its end, is not nothing! To be sure, ONLY the Creator knows the point of His creation, although His works attest Him; but that merely emphasises the fact that without Him, life is in instrument without a song, a path without a point, a process without a purpose, a self-absorbing venture for adventure, the honing of skills without knowing the purpose of having them, a maximisation of pleasures without considering why they please, and the point of pleasure itself. If this were all, what is the good of it, and what is the difference between good and bad pleasures ? and is this the  moral of life to be this, please yourself, enjoy yourself, make much of yourself, as if the self were the centre of the universe, which manifestly it is not!

Not self-belief, then, but the salvation of the Lord, is the criterion. You need to know absolutely what is true, and the ONLY place to find it is in the absolute, and the only way to find that is in Him who has deigned to express Himself, not only in the matchless technical wisdom of DNA and its coded allies, but in words designed for the constructed result, known as man. To the design which is man, then, there is the designation by the Designer, by the One who is divine, of what technically and physically, is to continue to keep the generations of man in place; and no less is there that of what is needed to instruct them through the faculties granted. In the former are created symbols that command construction of bodies, through embryo to childhood and man;  in the latter, through the created fact that man has a spirit which can heed, understand, comprehend and consider even the things of God,  comes wisdom. It is to make you wise, in the case of man, to salvation.

Thus God did not fail to speak as Commander (Isaiah 55:4) to the speaker created by His own speech in the first place. He did not fail to communicate with the hearer, whose speech facilities and hearing functionalities He invented. He did not leave us without a handbook, or give to our gyrations, no direction. The two books, that for our existence, in code, and that for our attention in word: these are not in dissonance, for the one is addressed to the other, and each is good for its part.

Salvation however ? Is there a slight or significant dissonance in this chord, relative to the music of self-satisfied life ? Undoubtedly there is; and there is more. There is a discrepancy between this and the path to self-centred, sin-oblivious glory.

If you want the latter, you cannot obtain the former. It is not a dilemma however, since the only disadvantage of the former is that you need to be re-fashioned, and if that is not to your taste, then by all means find the exact and precise meaning of eternal destruction; for what is created and yet makes itself self-sufficient is mere rubbish, the ultimate dissident. Dissidence from disaster and asking for life, this is to be preferred to that; but your will, the correlative creation of liberty, is able to choose such negative things. Some pick about in garbage pits; and they have their own reasons.

It is accordingly not self-belief, in that little microcosm of creation, the self, the psyche and the spirit of man, but faith in the Lord, which matters. This means that you LISTEN and seek to DO what is prescribed by the Lover and MAKER OF LIBERTY! for creation in the form of man. You can deny logic and lord and life, or any combination at will; but not reasonably.

You can find the Maker of liberty, and this not to engender its loss, but to find its meaning; for you cannot opt to be a god when it is not in your scope, any more than a fountain pen can opt to be a type-writer. When you find what is your scope, then there is liberty. Then the Seagull can fly and also know where it is going and why...

Then you find FOR your will, what is HIS WILL; and having found from this, that to be bound to reality is not serfdom but spiritual liberty, that it is the opening up of the air designated FOR you, and marvellous indeed, that it is the companionship of the Lord which is available for you: you can fly on the way He has provided with all the scope that salvation from sin provides. Thus, embraced by His energy, propelled by His power, in His peace, and for His purposes, you can fly knowing that liberty is His creation, and NOT to be gods is truth and hence deliverance from the lacerations of fiction.

As to will, imagine this, that at some point in your life you make a will, not for what is to be when you die, but what is to be while you live, and because you live. It is a PERSONAL will about your person, for your life.  To what would this will lead ? Or is your purpose rather to find, know and do the will of God ? To be sure, you WILL not so will if God does not enable you to do so; but since the Bible makes it perfectly clear that He IS love, and that He is truth, and that He would have all to be saved, then you have His movement above all, and nothing will distemper His design. He will not intemperately thrust damnation on you, though you deserve it, while His love abounds and His grace is sufficient and His Gospel is impelled to all. He will however do it His way, for sin blinds.

Sin is beyond us because of our foolishness, but not beyond Him because of His wisdom and wit. Thus all that is needed is to repent and call on His name and ASK for life, for whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved (Acts 2, cf. John 6:40). It is a life for life transaction as Romans 5:1-12 makes so clear, and since He has paid enough for any, it covers all who come aptly (Matthew 20:28, Galatians 3:1-13), for ever (I John 5:11-12, John 5:24, 4:14, 10:9,27-28).

Leaving then the ultimates to Him, seek Him and you will find, seek where He is, and you will find Him. Seek with all the heart, you will find the heart of truth (Jeremiah 29:13, (Isaiah 55); and seek where His word tells you, in repentance for salvation by His grace, setting your trust in Him who died and arose and returns in His time, just as He first came in His day: and you will be found.

It is not self-doubt, then, that is an enemy, but Saviour-doubt. It is this which is to be eliminated. It is He who is to be found, relished and relied on, not oneself.

It is not self-assurance which is to be found, in all its little terrains, but Christ-assurance; for His power knows no limit, His concern no abortion and His endurance no end.

It is not your own will, a will-o'-the-wisp which is the criterion, but His, God's will as the strength of your life; for HE knows what He is doing, not by mere telling words of niceness to Himself, but because all knowledge is His, and with it, He created all (Proverbs 8, John 1:1-3, Colossians 1:15, Revelation 4:11, Isaiah 45:1-12). Knowing it, He has humbled Himself to showing it; and showing it, He has in obedience to the plan of divine salvation, gone to the Cross of Calvary to settle accounts, being practical and perfect, precise and compassionate, the Prince of Life from the Father of grace, loving and sending, coming and doing, in the glory of the trinitarian munificence. To ignore it, it is to mar not Him, any more, for already He was marred more than the sons of men (Isaiah 52:13ff.), but to be married to marring, your own.

To receive it, however, to receive Him, is the reciprocity to reality.

OF WEDDINGS AND THE CHILDREN

 Let us, having met the Lord, proceed to a wedding. It is to that of II Corinthians 7:1 with Romans 5:9-10.

Here we find the need for perfecting holiness in the fear of the Lord, as we clean ourselves from all the foulness of flesh and spirit, which loves to call itself by other names, thus giving a real romp for psychiatry.  That is in Corinthians.

Then we need to rest in and rely on the provision of the Lord, whose assurance is total, eternal and whose power works behind, and in and through us if we are possessors of His salvation, which is utterly free for the simple reason that He has paid for it (Romans 3:23ff., Ephesians 2, Isaiah 55). You can't earn what is paid for, any more than you can congratulate yourself on the education you 'achieved' if your father paid your school fees. You can however work; for the night, as Christ informed us all, is coming when no man can work (John 9:4). The prince, and the governing system of this world has been slowly, and now more quickly, coming to that form where liberty will be as controlled throughout it, as it already is in China, and has been in the USSR, and would have been by Hitler and Stalin.

Devilries are always hard on liberty, for it is part of the image of God in man, and when man hates God, one of the first things he seeks to seize is liberty, in order that he might force himself, his system, his dream (as in Jeremiah 23), onto the race, and pose in the place of the Almighty, without the power or the truth or the capacity to withstand due test. Using liberty, he denies it, and denying it, he goes to his grave, sooner or later, where he can find the price of such feckless and bizarre delusions. It is for the devil to deny reality; it is for the people of God to live it.

Thus the Christian rests in the Lord, aware of His power, delighted in His strength, unafraid of the prince of this world (John 14:30), whose exactions are bestial, continual and rising. Rising from all this, the people of God proceed with the doing the will of God with joy, as the play comes to its last Act.

What however are the children of such a wedding of activity and rest, or of reliance and rigour as this, shown in Romans 5:9-10 and II Corinthians 7:1 ? How do such marvels of grace as these gifts make themselves known in living ?

First there is active peace and impelled living (Isaiah 26:1-4, Philippians 4:;1-7, Matthew 7:21ff.). When you KNOW God, it is as impossible to be merely drifting, as it is when a piece of wood taken from the sea, becomes part of a powered boat. Drift is then out of the question. Its nails may loosen betimes; but this needs but a whack or two of the hammer, which may hurt, for discipline is sure for the children of God. Yet it puts you where your place is, and that, it moves! It moves according to the skill and will of the navigator of that boat!

What more is to be found among the children of such a wedding as this ? Why there is calm in calamity - not the artificial and psychically cosmetic variety, but an underlying calm, that has strength BECAUSE of trust in the Lord, and awareness of His ways. Thus there is meaning in challenge, and a park for peace, with the trees of wisdom and the flower of faith.

But what are the sorts of activities of such children ? indeed of the children of God ? What are characteristics of Christian living ?

Now there are some alterations from the ways and wisdom of this world, which is as well, since it is manifestly digging its own pit, powerless to combine wisdom and power, grace and truth, liberty and love, sagging like the belly of some gross enormity of excess, hopelessly towards its own feet. Axioms of worldliness become actions of truth. What then ?

It is not self-defence, but the defence of the Gospel which matters (Philippians 1:17 - hence these 124 books!).

It is no more a matter of a particle, but a person who is active, not a piece of whatever it is, but a grounded, founded personal being.

It is not a plasticity, according to this or that philosophy which is to be found, but a living sculpture, made by the hand of the Lord, by God Himself, who first made us, now bringing on the completion in spirit, of what having strayed, is now in the way. It is now a matter of His hand working in His divine studio, beautifying the meek with salvation, forming them by His Spirit on this earth (II Corinthians 3:17-18).

It is no more a mere (musical) movement, but a divine symphony in which one participates.

But let us list it; for it is:

	Not an atom assigned but an invention intelligised (TM),
	Not a blob but a personal product spiritualised,
	Not a god or pretension, but a grace-receptor vitalised,
	Not a plasm unknown, but a spiritual child, made in, for and assigned for the image of God,
	Not a prince, strutting and striding into the pulpit of self-belief, but a brand plucked from the fire, reconstructed into the household of faith,
	Not a unit in an undiscovered unity, fragmented by frenzies and cracked by ennuis, but a citizen of the commonwealth of the redeemed,
	Not a subject for rule by psyche, society or desire, but a subject of the Lord, in liberated subjection to the Lord of life,
	Not a quiddity uncalled, arousing desire, but a chorister called to sin God's praise, because He is worthy of it, and reality requires it,
	Not driftwood, thrust by the swollen rivers but a denizen of delight in the gracious eye of the Lord (cf. Zechariah 2:8),
	Not a speck of wood before a useless magnet, but a filing of iron, directed in defile, delivered form the defilement of rust,
	Not a gate crasher to inept parties of mindlessness, but an entrant, through the energy of God, by the door of Christ, to the desire of the nations (Haggai 2:7), whose resting place is glorious (Isaiah 26:1-4, 11:10, Matthew 11:28ff.), who is the friend who NEVER fails, whose companionship is life,

THIS is HOME!

All the asininities of self-centred, self-contradictory, dilemma-routed, antimony-invaded philosopher here are laid to rest, not in peace, but in pieces (cf. SMR Chs. 3, 5, 10).

Here are - meaning in large print, method exposed, dubieties disabled, creation interpreted, the machinations of imaginary machines turned into the marvel of witnesses of deity in its Majesty, surveyors of splendour, signatories of the peace pact.

Born of blood, and so brought to the birth, born  of the Spirit of God, Himself bearing the children of God to the light, now breathing, new air with newly functional lungs, in the household of faith are these who find home in the Lord. Here faith has its object in being subject to the objective oracles of God. Thus is it for those who are companions to the incomparable Christ in whose hands is all judgment, and who judges this, that just as he who disbelieves in Him and His salvation is condemned already, so the one who believes does not come into condemnation, for it is excluded: that one has already passed from death into life, having everlasting life already (John 3:16-19, 5:24, 6:50-54, I John 5:11-12), incapable of perishing, or being subject to the snatching of the envious, such as Satan!

The design of the Designer includes the deliverance of the design, in this case not by imperious action, but freely, with the designation of its life's work, the assignation of its eternity, and the proclamation of its Prince, the Prince of life (Acts 3:15), keeper of His children, in kindness for ever (Titus 2:11-3:7, Romans 5).

The ground never moves here (Isaiah 33); and the growth of His plantings is exuberant, activated by the watering of the Spirit of God (Isaiah 32:15-18, John 4:14, 7:37-38, Ezekiel 47), and blessed by the sun of righteousness with healing in His wings (Malachi 4:2), the vast panoply of peace.

Gratitude for grace is like warmth from the sun upon one's skin in Winter. It is elemental, necessary, unavoidable, delightful, right and relished. Look at the eyes of a dog when the master is going for a walk, a romp; and think about these things. It is not an affectation, but a realisation, not a thought merely, but a response of life.

As I Corinthians 1:30 tells us, Christ is indeed made to us who believe,

the wisdom from God, the righteousness and sanctification and redemption,

so that we may glory in the Lord.

In Him we may glory with accuracy, in God the Sent,

in Him who is the definitive image of God the Sender (Hebrews 1, Isaiah 48:16),

whose word is applied to our hearts by His Spirit,

and there, there is rest in the midst of abundant activity;

for it is rest to serve such a Saviour,

Himself not less than God (Philippians 2, John 8:58),

in love and grace, with mercy and labour

staying not beyond man, but becoming man to lead us to God (II Peter 3:18).