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CHAPTER 5

GRACE AND THE GRACEFUL

Creation, Redemption, Realism, Renegacy,

Truth, Parallels and the Ultimates

The Artistry where the Artist is Known

The concept of grace is often in Christian circles, associated with FREE grace, with the GIFT of eternal life and with the contradictory emphasis which flesh likes to make, of MY works instead of GOD's works, as if to correct  the  Almighty. The latter is often placed as an alternative or complement to the work of God; but "THIS is the work of God, said Christ, that you should believe in Him whom He has sent". Salvation, Paul categorically affirmed, is not of works, lest any should boast.

However, there is more - and NOT LESS - to grace than this! It is a true representation which is given above in terms of free grace; and it is true to the last wit of Holy Writ. Yet we must, having seen this actuality, look for further reaches of this wonder of divine splendour. There is also in life a certain quality called gracefulness. This may often be associated with gliding on ice, with the form of an aeroplane, the loftiness of the eagle's flight, with the delicate, all but soaring work of skiing, with the fluent use of wind in the fascinating wing play of an adventurous bird and such aerobic, mobile things. The idea may also refer to the soft, undulating surfaces of territory, with rivers wandering in lush and fertile quietness among the tissues of green.

This gracefulness is one of the beautiful and fluent features of creation which sin can distort, but not destroy in this life. When we blend these two features of grace and gracefulness,  we become aware of a certain quality which the Creator has made available to life. It is a combination of order, discretion in design, beauty,  competence, composure and finesse, realism and gratitude shown in deft and artistic disposition of resources.

It is often found in little things, so that as with the case of a painter at last moving back from the detail of his picture, to see how it appears from a reflective distance, so here there is a quality, an  atmosphere, a meaning, impact and measure, a lithe or artistic wholeness. The swan will often give something of this feeling in its majestic, peaceful and orderly progress.

Thus in Psalm 104, we find a certain coverage of the nature of pastoral creation, yes and oceanic and atmospheric, in which the orderliness and competence, the kindness of disposition and the adequacy of divine provision, the combination of elements in the structured collation of the whole is rejoiced in, as in an irenic treasure.

                           The earth is full of Your possessions - "

In passing, it should be remembered that the 'wine' is not 'strong drink' which has another term for it in the Hebrew, but need mean no more than the weak, grape-derived beverages which had a certain cleanness and sweetness, from their mode of preparation and were common refreshment. As to strong drink, see Proverbs 20 and 23! Apparently distillation was not known till the Middle Ages, when raw, whiskey, gin type concentrations became known.

Nevertheless, the abuse of even lightly alcoholic grape products was always possible. Wilkerson in his Sipping Saints pointed out the extensive use of concentrated grape juice as a safe, sweet and non-alcoholic store, held in reserve; and while some derivatives could have a low alcoholic content, there was here a method of having a safer drink for hygienic purposes. The fact that a term can be used in different ways is scarcely novel. We ourselves have non-alcoholic wine or cider. On pp.  25-26 the author noted gives some coverage of the different words for drink and wine, asserting that the normal translation for grape juice IS in terms of 'wine'; although of course 'wine' is far broader in scope than that. His point: it is not less so.

Indeed, as to ancient culture in this matter, he cites Horace, who explicitly speaks of unintoxicating wine, 35 B.C., while noting that Aristotle said of sweet wine that it would not intoxicate. Plutarch, around 60 A.D., he also notes as observing "filtered wine neither inflames the brain nor infects the mind and the passions, and is much more pleasant to drink." It is really quite vain to try to adapt culture and word spread alike, to any preconceived notion of what is intended. Doubtless the context will often allow some discernment as to what of ancient beverages, like those of modern times, is intended.

Mixture with water was also rabbinically recommended. Obviously, the censures on strong drink and the ironically but instructively jocular Proverbs exposé on bibulousness, together with the restrictions on the Nazirite and by the Rechabites meant that there was a known danger, a desirable purity and a strength of conviction on the due and undue use of grape juice, whether in the light and ordinary concentrate or mixed with water when any fermentation occurred. Obviously, more or less care  could be taken  as to what sort of drink one would take.

The comparison with drinking wine and associating with adders is scarcely suggestive in Proverbs 23, of any light attitude to alcohol! For one's own part, any thought of trifling with vipers is vapid. It is not a thing where any margin would be relevant. The concept would be: if this is in, I am out!

It is not a thing to be done! You do not PLAY at it, but rather  keep yourself elsewhere with some considerable care.

In fact, one finds that deep red grape juice has an  extraordinarily refreshing effect.

We must not however stray from our quest, the concept of grace with gracefulness.

The Gardener of Grace

There is, then, in the above Psalm 104 quotation, an indication of order, seemliness, even artistry of composition, rather in the spirit of some of the paintings of rustic, quiet England, of John Constable. All is provided for; a geometrical, a meteorological, a pastoral composite is given in the realm of available graciousness and governance.

You see it all far more intensively, but in the explicit realm of saving grace, with a splendid natural background in Hosea 14.

                           But transgressors stumble in them.

Here is an intensive gracefulness and  graciousness combined; and how artistic is the compilation! The supervening beauty of the lily is set upon the gently growing roots which are so well covered for their needs, and above comes the fragrance from such an alluring garden of joy and work of blessed peace and contentment. It is not however a David Grayson sort of contentment, as if stopping at the physical expression of it, or the mere inward response to that. It moves FROM divine satisfaction and composure to its expression in human felicity, which results from receiving with joy the way home from sin, and becoming no more seedy, but like a garden with its fruits and roots well placed, lengthening the one, accumulating the other.

It is not in the realm of idealistic dream, nor in that of clusters of portentous ideas; rather it moves from the underlying dynamic of sin, dumped, and the overlay of grace and goodness, which develops into beauty with strength, as in Isaiah 33:6, when one takes root in the ground of God, culminating in the foundation of the Gospel of grace in the gift of eternal life in Christ, as in Isaiah 55, or Hosea 13:14.

There is here to be no mere communing with things, no empty thought focussing on ideals, but rather there are words to be used. That is the explicit requirement. You do not stand dumb with hope, and mute with non-expression, as if the heart in its turbulence, turgidity or arrogance had nothing to say. No, take words; and these are to be addressed not to the sublime in general, but to the divine from whom sublimity comes, whether in mountain ranges, roaring rages of thrusting waters, white with a purity that insists on spreading its glory, or in the wonders of sacrificial splendour in which the Lord has shown the nub, and from which come the spokes of man's response in His name.

These words are moreover, no simple greeting, but spiritually explicit; for before any gracefulness, there is need of grace.

Thus

"Take with you words,"

comes as the step before the garden intimations, in their beauty become relevant at all.

Further, there is action:

"And return to the Lord."

Nor is this all, as if the return were some kind of sombre resumption of fealty.

Rather is it this:

"Say to Him, 'Take away all iniquity, receive us graciously."

There is the divine grace before gracefulness, and it is from this that the beauties of Hosea 14 derive, and on which the growth devolves, as the roots of what is now by divine work, well planted (and so not to be uprooted as in Matthew 15:13), proceed to grow in their natural proclivities, with artistic industry and functional prowess.

Thus II Peter 3:18 tells us to "grow in grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ."

Indeed, in II Peter 1, we are told of the numerous diggings and energies which are well disposed to beautify the established garden: virtue, knowledge and self-control, brotherly love and godliness; but these no more create the basis, than does the sky create the stars. They create neither the ground of the planting, nor the planting itself, nor the streams, as those of the Spirit of God, shed abroad in the heart of the people who are His (Romans 5:5), just as the sap spreads forth its natural grace and vigour to the plants into which it freely flows.

"In ME is your fruit found,"

the prophet continues, just as Christ in John 15 makes the same point.

Of COURSE, what is planted by His grace has that graceful relationship, with the trunk, or as vine with the stock. It is not wild anymore. It acts as such branches do, receiving sap and showing fruit. However, as to Judas-type venturers, wild stock rupturing the graft with their recklessness; as to branches close in space but not in grace, near in word but not in heart, these are mere fictitious factions, ready for decisive pruning. They are common in fading churches, unfit to be retained; and when, to revert, you see them once again as simply persons, then their unfeeling bowels,  loosed as they were not digesting good food before, fall from their withered hearts, the very consummation of wreckage (cf. Acts 1, concerning Judas). He is, always remember, not only THE traitor, but the TYPE of the traitor against the Lord! HE knew better, and did worse, was a devil from the first, and showed it to the last.

There is, then,  what is called the 'sport', the reversion to type, as when on a lime base, you graft an orange shoot. You simply cut off what is reversion to wild type; but what is of the orange type, it is sure. It looks like orange leave, bears orange fruit, because this is what it is. It is not merely close in proximity, like a false church member, to the foundation; it grows in it, moves on it. It has become natural to it.

The Christian knows that in Him is his or her fruit found. There is an abiding in fellowship by faith, there is a remembrance more than that of memory, an involvement with the very plans and programs of the Almighty, which, groomed to be biblical, are also dynamised by the divine, moved the Lord, helped by His graciousness, founded in His grace.

It could not be otherwise; for you might as well sit on a bicycle and await the traction control to operate, with the ABS braking system and the electronic balance, as look to someone other, or something other  than your Saviour; for He, being GOD, is indispensable, gracious in His reception, and reconstitutive in His surgeon-like actions, making of one thing, the lost, another, the found. Their spiritual genes now differ inalienably as in I John 3:9. As to the 'seed' of God, it "remains in him." You do not expect what is simply not there; but you act with what is now there, because its drive, precision, power, grace and wonder are operative. In love you work, in grace you are enabled, and the gracefulness of the goodness of God is like the gleaming waters, alive in the Summer with cloud shadows and moving with eloquent maritime beauty.

As Paul declares in Romans 8:10:

"And if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin,
but the Spirit is life because of righteousness."

If the flesh tries to war, and it will, requiring confrontation in its subtle ways, yet it takes on a Champion in Christ; indeed as Paul put it, "for me to live is Christ, and to die is gain" (Philippians 1:21).

Now in terms of graciousness, what is the use of believing in Him, and ignoring what He says; or saying you believe, when in fact you imagine that God, despite the irreducible evidence to the contrary, even speaks in His book and does not do it! (cf. Pitter-Patter... Ch. 4, SMR Chs. 8-9). That, it is the very kernel, and the diseased kernel at that, of unbelief. It countermands the verifiable facts and resides in the sullen stupour of this world in its energetic efforts to loose the bonds and throw away the cords of divine attachment (Psalm 1). At this, the Lord laughs (Psalm 2:4); but it is laugh of irony, like the rumbling of the dam as it ruptures its walls and comes thundering in its devastating flow, down the valley to destroy the town below.

The Weeds of Subversion

When grace is subverted, and kindness is made a matter of fractious if not fretful cavil, then the cavalier himself may smile; but it is not for long. The Commonwealth of grace comes indeed, the kingdom of heaven does not change; it is just that someone with the false tag for it, becomes the wag for it, and is dispensed as foul water from a tub.

Indeed, the cardinal example of such things, the scoffing at the Saviour was acutely foretold not only as to the mocker and the divine response in the resurrection (Psalm 2, 22, 16), but in its mode (Isaiah 52-53, Psalm 22), its atmosphere (Micah 5:1-3) and its emotional content in the nation of Israel in which it was perpetrated (Isaiah 49:7). As foretold, and that as always,  so it was (Luke 23).

The national response in the rulers of Israel was one of ABHORRENCE towards the Saviour. Here is a good example of graciousness. It is unwise to rush things and to commandeer the latest folly in order to avoid the issue of Jesus Christ.  Flailing arms of folly are  always about, never achieve anything, attacking the record but being rebutted with a sedate surety which generation by generation, leaves those later to marvel at the brutish folly of the mockers who went before. Conducting yourself down the latest channel of cavil, responding to the last word of irrepressible folly from the witless heart of sin-sodden culture is merely to inherit disaster ... except grace intervene, and that leads to words... which you take WITH YOU, to Him, as you come.

Despite the endless testimony of history and reason, scripture and saint, the empirical and the rational, the general and the particular, they still try to cut those cords. It is, in one way, rather as if an embryo, if it could, were trying, however, to cut its own umbilical cord!

Again, like pettish children, they try. How then can one expect GRACEFULNESS of living to come when disgrace is the attitude towards the divine kindness! As it was to be, so it is, in detail, with hearts failing for fear as in Luke 21, the cited preliminary as the cyclotronic force of sin thrust the world along, like shimmering lightnings, to its explosive end!

Yet it is not so where Christ reigns. Gracefulness not in body, but in spirit and in mind, then comes, not as a tepid substitute for vigour and acute application, but as an atmosphere of kindliness and order, composure in the One who composed us, providing because it is from the ultimate source of power, strength before atrocities and continuation in the face of the seemingly impossible. So was it in the early Church, foe of Religious Authorities and Civil alike; and so was it till the Roman Empire itself capitulated in the person of Constantine, and the victims became the victors, Christ being openly acknowledged at last.

Nevertheless, marvellous as was this graceful strength, it is not this world which is to be run in that way (John 14:30); and Rome quickly corrupted itself, and later did so more and again, as in various pagan practices and peculiarities, such as the High Priest (now pope) and goddesses like Venus (turned in type with great distortion,  into Mary). Yet the Church of Jesus Christ, in climes adverse or propitious, continued its range of receiving grace and finding graceful goodness from the Lord, whose design being His own, knows both our frames, our weaknesses and our needs.

As it is written (James 4:5-6 - see James 4),

"Or do you think that it is to no purpose that the scripture speaks ?    {cf. Hebrews 9:5}

Does the Spirit which dwells within us yearn to envy!

But it is more grace that He gives

           {this enables us in English to bring out the force of the "more"
            which in Greek comes first, before the verb, to be followed by 'grace'},

As it is written, God resists the proud,

But gives grace to the lowly."

The same thrust is to be found in I Peter 5:5, which proceeds to exhort us to cast ALL our care on Him, since He cares for us.

As the body has its own marvels in its systems of resistance to disease (aborted somewhat in AIDS, just as assault by disease is itself aggravated in impact by UNNATURAL behaviour in sexuality for example), so does our Creator have His own ways of meeting our requirements of heart and mind, emotion and spirit, disposition and strength in that grace of heart and gracefulness of care that yearns for our spiritual well-being, not least in prayer (Romans 8:26-28). The body is not alone in its means of resistance to pollution; for He gives more grace to the lowly, to the heart, to the spirit, to the texture, tone and vitality of life.

Foxe's Book of Martyrs shows much of the marvels of those made to suffer for Christ, in meeting their inane tormentors with grace, strength and composure. In the famous case of Cranmer, though he failed for a little, signing a recantation, being a churchman who loved composure, yet he did not let the desires for gracefulness to overturn the necessities of grace. The latter COMES FIRST, the other being more like a derivative.

Thus at his sermon, supposedly a submission, he assailed Romanism, exposed its folly, and when consigned to the flames, the contemporary idea instead of a cross, he burnt that hand that had signed the now recanted recantation, this first! Even in agony, there was a certain gracefulness, a certain sublime feeling of seemliness and nobility, order and propriety, meaning and purpose.

Human weeds who, taking body,  twiddle thumb screws and light fires under people only however appear to subvert grace in their victims: and where it is truly subverted, it is only in themselves. It is not the length of life which is the criterion of godliness and eternity (as Isaiah 57:1-2 emphasises), but what is done with and in it: and this above all, what is done with Christ in the heart, where the responsibility is earnestly one's own!

The Glamour of Naturalistic Self-Development
and the Reality of Divine Confrontation

This world and Jesus Christ are antithetical, on collision course. That is why the people of this world so often use the name of Jesus Christ when they hit a thumb, ask someone to 'lay off' or temper hardness, or simply wish to make a high calibre impact in their speech.

People fondly imagine that the magic waters of evolutionism will sprinkle themselves on this human race and make it CAPABLE of being ruled, helped, their pillows plumped up for them, their toe nails cut, even if aged, their mouths fed, their psyches saturated with drugs or well-being tools of this or that kind, so that it will all end well!

They have an absurd confidence in 'science', which merely means systematically tested human knowledge which so far survives; and it is precisely where scientific method, aborted because of this proud faith in mankind, is treacherously dismissed, that they wave the wands with which they affect to bring something from nothing, matter in its delicious organisation from something, mind from matter, spirit from mind, or any other fable, and make it ready to set it all before the king, who is imagining he will have all of this, for his dinner.

Then, fortified by this anti-verified and prodigious rot, this riotous renegacy  imagine further, that if all this could come from nowhere, and make itself all nicely up, synthesised and mutually operative in all its parts, why then, somehow, somewhere, it must be possible to make mankind an operable commodity instead of a bunch of internationally and mutually destructive nuts.

This is a great faith, like that which would find the square root of minus one. It is founded on the opposite of facts, contrary to history, logic and test; still it helps some people to indulge the anti-God passion and go on in the same delusion with which they started. However, just as this philosophic intrusion into science deludes many, in and outside that profession, and the realities of NON increase of information by natural processes^*1A, NON development of higher kinds of organisation from lower ones by mere pressures without intelligence (cf. *3 below), remain as they have always done, the unbroken rule: so does the reality remain. Nor is He who gives it grace inactive.

Indeed, He foretold this inane game before it came, as one to be popular in our day, declaring of this coming phase of history, that "they will turn aside to fables", and "have itching ears", for they will "not endure sound doctrine" (II Timothy 4). Indeed, God declared through Paul, they would "heap up to themselves" teachers of such things; and they have done so to the point that it is as conspicuous as a sign of our times as the atomic bomb, its impact also predicted (cf. SMR pp. 790ff., and 803ff.).

It is like the case of the children's game: COMING READY OR NOT. The end peeps through its fingers, many are coming to feel, because it is so near ...

Currently there are many who smell  a certain air in things, which makes them think, and like a sea voyage, the change of air may help!
 

In fact, the magnificence of creation is as irreducibly manifest as the validity of thought itself (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go!), and it manifests its completed character in KIND*^*1, continually, despite every wild thought and frantic hope of laboratory co-operation, which however never comes. The kinds are as obvious as are the kinds of house which some manufacturer makes, with variation within kind, depending on the call in the environment concerned.

With the creation now, the curse is as obvious as the grace: and the presence of intricate devices, like scorpions and snakes, plagues and spiders, filled with endless-seeming capacities, such an assortments of syringes for injection, like marvellously hardy and splendidly self-spreading weeds, merely attests what the Bible has  stated from the very first. Man like a convict, has escaped the word of God and is on the run, while the pressures of authority continually remind him of his wild spree, that it is as fatal as it is furious, and  as godless as it is spurious.

As time passes, the chronic character of man's career on the run becomes more and more conspicuous, till at the present, many think the game is about up: yet they do not return to the Lord. It is exactly as in Amos 4, where God in the face of the self-blighting follies of Israel over a long period, points out various progressive disciplines which He brought on them, to awaken them. These they ignored, so that in the end, He declared to them, "Prepare to meet thy God!"

There is an end. It is not in some vague, constantly confronted piece of irrational imagination and hope, in man's taking over the helm and directing the good ship (good ?) humanity to the harbour which man, in his infinite wisdom is preparing. Man continually suffers dictators like Hitler and Stalin, Mao or Napoleon, in order to get the ungainable, and secure the insecure, to seize the laws of the universe, or the rich, or anything else that is lying around, or  seems to be, and make hay. However the crop is not of the right seed. All this is seedy and unspiritual, invalid and vicious. It is the child becoming the man, the prisoner becoming the judge, the irrational becoming the professor and the culpable becoming the innocent (cf. *6 below).

Nor does it work. The end is not in the realm of romance, like all good fairy stories. It is in the realm of the rational. The Creator has already cursed the earth, forcing work, admitting disease, giving posts to plagues (cf. Amos 4, Romans 8, Genesis 3). Man is a package within it, the earthly cause of the confrontation. The issues are clear; the remedy is obvious and has been for millenia, and the penalty of guilt against this very divinely directed and graciously granted remedy, as well as against oneself, is fatal. Remedy is for taking, not breaking; and this remedy, being already resurrected, cannot be broken.

The scene of history, it moves: this also is sure. But it moves on a foundation which came with its creation and it moves to an imbroglio which comes because its desecration; and there is no help for it but where the Author has spoken. It is useless to pretend that He has no mind, for ours are the derivative; that He has no care, for His word demonstrates His vital action in redemption (cf. SMR, TMR): it is necessary to realise that the curse is just the commencement. The ship of sin is sailing to no subtle and charming harbour. Its  end, like that of all delusive desecrations, it the garbage. Smouldering garbage tends to linger.

Thus even the camp of naturalistic idolatry, as old almost as the human race, always seeking new clothes, it has some things right. Thus there are laws, there is development, there is a solution, and man has a place in it. This is true, though even here there is some dissension. Yet where scientific method prevails, there is no ground for divergence.

The laws however are not in man's hand, which itself moves by laws, nor in man's mind, the rationality of which is occasioned by laws, some of which man even consciously learns under the heading of logic, and may even understand; and the development ? It is not of things scratching their own backs, and inventing new ones in the delectations of magical dynamisms unfound, not in inherent powers within the things that are, to act as naturalistic strategists and devisers, so that their so brilliant inventions can have nothing more to do than show how very brilliant they were, dropping like rain from above, the only inventions without an inventor.

The folly of such arrogant disdain for reason and revelation alike, has inherited already just that pattern of war, violent and proliferating death, hatred and evil which Christ foretold and John in Revelation itemised. Smiting your neighbour does not in fact produce brilliance in new spontaneous productions, making of simple murder, marvellous and prodigious life. This concept has been thrust on man until he is now murdering in millions, and finding not brilliant results in 'nature', as if impressed, but anguish, agony and death. Death is not a womb, nor is survival greatness.

To push it further in vain efforts to control and abuse space for man's self-centred illusions, a part of the universe acting as its king (v. Psalm 115), this is merely one of the symptoms of the racial, cultural paranoia. As to every type of rancid reaction  and rebellion against the laws of God, every effort to make law come from non-law, non-mind and non-thought, thrust with passion and equipped with a frivolous unscientific zeal: it fails in its every formulation, political or biological. It is a seething wasteland of diabolical conceit; and man is paying by the million in casuistry, outrageous regimes, mass murder, intimate murder from 'terrorists', inane atrocity exhibits guilty of crimes against the human race over which they seek to stand like some giant, the product of the factories of hatred and delusion.

Nothing ever works (cf. *3 and *6 below). The further so clever man proceeds with his self-creative irrationalism, the more his poseur's position, his regal disregard of what he actually is and from what he came, becomes entangled with blood, like the red web of a spider spun over the face of the earth, and rampant with injustice, almost now a regular way of proceeding, flaming in the furious fires and futile flames of self-assertion.

When a lot of these inflamed units do it, collision is not merely possible, but certain and ramifying. There are some collisions which no panel-beating will remedy, the hearts indeed of the drivers becoming preoccupied with vengeance, hatred and the clever application of power, to rectify the mess by more of it. Such is the disgrace of a ruined place.

Thus in the realm of grace, already burdened with the divine curse on folly, rebellious and retrograde man continues in his efforts to rub out the divine grace in the Gospel, so removing the First Aid Auxiliary from sight as far as may be. He now wants war without mercy, and to the uttermost height, clash without deliverance and confrontation with God Himself, precisely as comes at last, as in Revelation 19:19.

Thus the laws of nature (cf. TMR Chs.1,  8), of reason and of life require repentance in terms of the Creator's offer in  Christ; whereas this world requires abuse of the same, or its neglect or dismissal. There will, however, just as the endless ranters declare, be  development. It will be like that of atrocity providers from the way in the former Yugoslavia, now being extradited: for the nature of life and of reason will confront them more and more who seek to construct a way of life without regard to design or Designer, His goodness or His Gospel, in which He not only invites but requires man to repent and receive mercy on His terms. The Creator knows what He is doing and needs no counsel on this. As Isaiah 40:13 demands: "Who has directed the Spirit of the Lord, or as His counsellor has taught Him!"

The rambunctious, pseudo-regal clamour and clash of deluded man, seeking to surge through nature into glory, this distorted development, alas, is rudely operative in the double domain of knowledge and  rebellion. Thus, now that Iran is crowing about its nuclear power, it becomes the more  apparent that the more knowledgeable the rebellion, the more certain is disaster. Give a demented child  a gun and your home may harbour massacre. Where intolerant false, invalid and unverified religion seeks to dominate, it means that the cost tends to be discounted, and literally, the sky would be the limit: were it not that actually now it is becoming space which has this place!^*2A

The end, the outcome, this too will be seen, not in magical man inventing from his own contrived mind, gift of the Creator, a way to avoid Him in peace. Rather will the end of it all be in judgment and in mercy. Where the mercy has been displaced in the removal from sight of the Saviour, Jesus Christ, then only judgment remains (John 3;19,36). Where the mercy has been received, then the gift of eternal life and the fact of adoption into the family of God becomes the negation of confrontation  and indeed the demise of death. That is where the mortality which is such a breach and rupture to the thought and vitality of man, in his association with things eternal, is put aside for immortality, his natural but lost inheritance because of depravity. That is where death is swallowed up in victory (Isaiah 25:8 cf. I Corinthians 15:20ff., 15:50ff.).

There is in this a certain graceful beauty: for if the hatred that hastened the foolish abuse of this earth's resources in the name of one  particular creation called man is odious, yet the eventual removal from sight of the stale array of meaningless mutiny from the Master of Mercy has just that forming as in a painting of the meaning and the power of the painter.

Heaven would have been a curse for those who do not love God, for since He is love, that love would be in the air, in the very atmosphere of the place, as you see in Revelation 5.They are not required to enter where they have shown a final and fatal disinclination, and the Lord has ruled in their hearts, just as they have hardened their minds (cf. Matthew13).

They want to be far from Him ? hell is just that. There is an end, where truth continues to be itself, and lies become conspicuous for their fraudulent incapacity. It is not the end of a PROCESS, for the KINDS are already created, and have neither ground nor ability to leap forth from other  things. It is an end in JUDGMENT.

WHAT then is the nature of that judgment ? It is not that you defiled the truth and defied its source, merely, but that in the very presence of truth, arising from love, you reviled or rejected, or sought to remake even that, even the unmade, even the increate, the Saviour with His inveterate and immutable Gospel, the eternal Lord,  Jesus Christ Himself incarnate.

Yet where He is received, then the grace is accompanied by a certain gracefulness, for every sin is covered, every good work wrought is known. The gentle armour of God, with the truth and His righteousness and the Sword of the Spirit, the word of God, it suffices (cf. Ephesians 6).

When, in a recent mountain climb and hike, my son and I were repeatedly attacked by a determined and aggressive eagle, full of tricks, like being between us and the sun, or hovering at precisely that angle near to the vertical, but a little further back relative to our going, which was most exacting to reach for any viewing the assailant, or coming suddenly as  we mounted a knoll, from one side of it, seeking our backs: then the skill of lurking became most obvious. It was always there, or pondering our way, or avoiding it to circle.

There was for all the danger, however, a certain beauty, a grace quite remarkable in this deliciously engineered, vital  and vigilant bird. One could admire it, even when being attacked.

How much more is there a graceful bearing in the Saviour, when one admires the sheer competence and mastery which removes sin with decisiveness, bears it with justice, leads in grace and acts in sufficiency! (I Peter 1-2, I Corinthians 3:5-6, 4:6).

Even when one is reproved, if one needs discipline for anything, it comes from the Lord, and so has  a certain beauty (cf. Hebrews 12). In all His ways and works, there is an abundance, a liberality; so that the ludicrous imposition of  'surviving' appears as it is, a spurious slide from the point at issue. The arrival of life eternal, this requires  and has no steps, any more than did the rest of the creation's provisions. It is, like the creation, a  deposition of information and  a vitalising of the deposition.   THIS deposition is not for economy, but for riches of meaning, meat and grace, of peace and of profundity. It does not come in areas, like TB in the lung, but altogether, like any design which is to work.

Like all the other designs, it is past the wisdom of man; and yet, as with the creation, it gives to man  the very wisdom he both lacks and needs in one. There is both a Designer creation, to institute man, and a Designer redemption, to restore him. Let us by contrast now move into the erratic alogisms and fantasising dysfunctionality of the non-grace preoccupations which assail the fallen mind of man, like hypnotic delusions.

These, with their associated idols, have rendered this earth with the hostile imaginations of survival as king and nothing as basis, so inveterately polluted a product, so anguished a place and so grievous an environment that the angels might not cease weeping, were it not for the gracious splendour of the option presented to mankind (I John 2:2, Titus 2-3), towards whom God in His kindness has acted.

Before however we proceed, let us ponder the words of God, in their gracefulness as one of the features of His provisions wrought for mankind, and available to him. We mentioned I Corinthians 15:20ff., and 50ff.. Some citation from these follows, not least for the double purpose of exhibiting their grace and their gracefulness.

^§"But now Christ is risen from the dead,
and has become the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.

^"For since by man came death, by Man also came the resurrection of the dead.

^"For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive.
But each one in his own order: Christ the firstfruits,
afterward those who are Christ’s at His coming.

^"Then comes the end, when He delivers the kingdom to God the Father,
when He puts an end to all rule and all authority and power.
For He must reign till He has put all enemies under His feet.

^"The last enemy that will be destroyed is death. For 'He has put all things under His feet.' "

 

§^"Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does corruption inherit incorruption.

^"Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed
- in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.
For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible,
and we shall be changed.
For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.
So when this corruptible has put on incorruption, and this mortal has put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: 'Death is swallowed up in victory.'

'O Death, where is your sting?

O Hades, where is your victory?'

^"The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

^"Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable,
always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord."

The gracefulness of grace when the proligacy of rebellion is past is not the least of its benevolent and beneficent features, and it is indeed ineffable grace; for where strain and strife is past, the beauty of holiness spreads in all phases, like a massive fountain that spills and thrills as it spills in awesome beauty, down the slopes to the peak.

Returning from the Fairy Stories of Irrationalism

to the Reality of Work

We have in our survey above, looked at the nonchalant irrationalism of naturalism, but it may prove beneficial to compare its failure, in a number of fields, as a contrast unit to aid perception.

We voyage for inspection from time to time, to this disaster area of philosophy, which some in science have adopted as a favoured son, but we do not stay there, for there is no ground, and it is in free fall. We return then from this fairyland,  where the fairies of philosophy don't need much to do everything, and coming back to where the action is adequately based, sufficient, efficient and proficient, for the results, and the continued action for the restitution of what, given liberty, needs love for its reclamation. We come back, that is to where we have just been lingering.

To come back to this realm of intensive realism, it is a beautiful thing; but for action, it has required labour, a divine labour both to invent us, and then to dispel our ruins and rebuild. That, it is not simply a matter of being hauled back, like a tractor that fell into the ditch; but it requires  justice for its procedure, mercy for its movement back on line and ransom for its deliverance from the dynamics which assail such a frame as ours is, in humankind. In us, such declines as have been practised, these are such that the errors become not merely episodic, but inherent in the very constitution! Nothing can heal man but his Creator (cf. Jeremiah 6:14-17, Hosea 13:14).

Thus we have repeatedly found that real work has to be done for real results both in the institution of laws, the constitution of creations and the redemption of miscreants.

Consider what it is to move from fantasy to reality. It requires real work to make nothing the repository of ordered atoms, inscribe combining molecules with their institutional structure, provide chemical and physical laws with their functional correlatives in what is to obey them, so that they must be fashioned as responsive to them, to formulate analytical minds, and to contemplate these things in their interstices, without merely BEING them, while providing spirit for man, to enable will to adorn or disadorn the magnificent creation which in KIND, he is.

The Creator makes man very distinct from Himself, just as He makes him in some degree an analogy to Himself, so that man can think thoughts that relate to God, and to understanding his own amazing creation, and creativeness. He is not inscribed into His own created system, since He is immutable, time itself a mere invention where patience is required as a condition, and one that is a limit to man. Moreover, man is so made that he possesses, at best, some overview with room for error is to replace undertaking, rather than being bound by  mere conformity, such as matter possesses. Man is free to become error-ridden or even erratic, and has fully utilised these powers, the nether side of his aptitudes.

For that to function in man,  a realm of perspective in which imagination can be bent by will to discipline is necessary: this,  and not merely personal consciousness, thus enabling his will to act and to  apply itself, using an understanding within that, neither bound by matter nor alien to it, but formed for its supervision, with due regard to its laws. How devastatingly singular, wonderfully endowed and endued is mankind; but with what vengeance his inventions can be met, for hitting with the hammer of wilfulness, a child's cardboard toy is one thing; but attacking a billion dollar computer with one, this can have most distressing results. Will is a wonder, but it has potential for woe, and now woe is reaching its saturation point in this world, as foretold by Christ (Matthew 24:22). It comes. It does not linger.

Meanwhile, man, a prodigy of creation, works in his own way, within  the domain of his kind.

Thus for man, mind is needed to formulate laws after their creation, in the material realm, and to make them for himself, all of this moving into the realm of the spirit of man, so that mankind can or may not,  co-operate both with natural things, and each member of our race may do the same, each with the other. Such is the liberty bestowed on mankind, on this rank of realisation in persons, apt for spiritual beings, those not mere surveyors of mountains,  but in their roving scope, able to regard themselves, to consider his place, nature and significance.

Such is man. Naturally now, as part of a renegade race, man is utterly lost when he tries to do this, because as  his erring, because misdirected and severed spirit, tries to do what can be done only in co-operation with the Creator, there are systematic faults which appear. These render philosophic error sure, and hence farce, as is the history of philosophy, peppered with arrogance, that results in the endless claims and routs which characterise that field (cf. SMR Chs.    3,   10, and contrast with   5, and REASON, REVELATION and the REDEEMER).

The spirit of man, then, needed to make the mind disposable by will, which is the empirical case, may act inanely, for various motives,  both irrespective of the  testimony of experience and of the known facts.  It is however this facility, though it is an abused capacity, which makes man what he is, which provides for man a far greater wonder. The spirit of man may also move rigorously to conform to reality, and that, even in the face of temptation to find reward for NOT doing so, as in many of the philosophic, financial and political 'try-ons' or ludicrous presentations of propaganda, often nor worthy of a seven year old. His fall is pandemic; but his rise from ruin is selective, as grace intervenes. The scope for man redeemed, back in his place, is vast, the preciousness when he is in the place of grace correlative to the disaster when he is not!

It is a gracious thing indeed that we may still seek truth, desire reality. Let us rove in this realm with reason for a moment, as a prelude.

When we depress the actuality button, or if you will, apply our minds to what is to be found, not to be hoped or not hoped, then we find the three main laws of science as noted by Professor Barnes, in terms of scientific method, through means observational, formulable and testable, verificatory and valid, to confirm what reason requires^*2B . On the other hand, evacuation of reason on any model or for argument, evacuates with it any power to validate, even in deed to present a case. Self-contradiction merely affirms error.

It is necessary to contradict neither oneself, nor the facts, in any enterprise of understanding. If you contradict yourself, there is no need for anyone else to both to do so. 

Then we see that both reason and verifiable truth require a beginning for this universe (cf. Sparkling Life ... Ch. 8), for neither does delimitation come from nowhere, let alone nothing apt, nor does specification arise from no mind, since it requires conceptions, nor does running down fail to require an initial state in which the opposite has been done to allow it, nor does the reality of no new information naturally  'arising' in systems of design, provide permit for that acne of unreason, that nothing did it, or its purple-faced friend, that something inadequate performed these functions. (Cf. Causes.)

The facts of empirical reality do not allow for the current modes to be sufficient for the ultimate provisions, for what is to have created itself, for nature to have come from no source, or the book of nature to have been written by none, a fiddle of the inert, its contrivances arrivals from sub-moronic inertia.

All these things, they require institution, which is the same as temporality, commencement and definition, that they might be. Similarly, at the merely mental level, you require access to absolute truth to find the actual; for otherwise you merely react, without overview, a specification item in a relativity interstices, lacking organum, objectivity, adequacy and systematic competence at that level. Without that, your efforts to determine the case, are self-invalidating, making the effort a candidate for reductio ad absurdum at the outset.

There is a start to each phase. The other option, even in word format, merely begs the question by providing no cause, no ground, no reason and yet using this very same reason in irreconcilable self-contradiction and confusion, later on in the discussion. It finds no truth by the obligations of its own model, and when it finds observational contradiction likewise of its model, it merely muddles along, as if hope would replace negative findings, or time would cure endless anti-verifications (cf. SMR pp. 140ff., Scientific method, Satanic Method and the Model of Salvation).

 The debacle is on every side just as the justification of reason, realism and verificatory precision and validity from the outset, is complete (cf. .Celestial Harmony for the Terrestrial host). Just as grace provides in its realm, the added savour of gracefulness, so does rebellion from rationality and truth provide its own harsh reminders, its own WRONG WAY, GO BACK signals, with a frequency which constitutes much of modern history. Ignoring these signals, naturally, has led to many international accidents, sure to happen, strangely persistent as man shows the wonders of a magnificent construction, maleficently misused.

That having been said, however, let us compare the arena of life, the creation of living things in particular, ignoring further reference for the nonce, to the underlying void in naturalism, just noted and expounded at length in The gods of naturalism have no go!.

Let us consider the parallels.

Each has the first man, cell and so on. Each has arrival of decisive products.

Each proceeds in due course to man. He was not always around.

In creation's fact, each thing comes as a product of its Producer, since mind itself is one of the products, and intense, correlative components of analytical skill, honed to practicality and given applicability with rigour, are not the product of naked force or awakening genies - for who would construct those, be they aliens or any other; but they are the creation of the ultra-material, intra-specifying adequate source for all - for mind, matter and spirit, and for their synthetic collaboration.

To imagine otherwise is simply undisciplined thought, the romance of unreason.

Thus products DO come into nature : naturalism wants to make the receptacle the father; but a cup never created tea, steel a car- far less, did the irrational in its feebleness, make mind in its strength. It would be far more coherent in thought to make a baby author of the universe, than the sub-moronic.

In fact, the requisite Producer DOES indeed present the first of each kind, and for each the analytically composed and equipped mind, the operationally efficient spirit, and does - as He said in His book (cf. SMR), declare just that. The KIND, like any prototype, is there, and in this case, the means of multiplication is lively, not merely material, and involves participation, not in the programmatic elements, but in the execution of them, in procreation and motherhood as the babe develops, with fatherhood reaching its culmination as the babe is born. The kind, however, is operative over all this generational continuation, moulding and defining, requiring and acting.

The awesome models come in kinds, like any of man's own productions: where engineering work comes from the workshop or similar fabrications from this or its equivalent, where the work is done. For our KIND,   the mind duly comes from the power of the only adequate producer of rationality, configured relationships and the operative laws, thought and its tidy sequences, understanding and its rigorous conditions; and though the need of institutive intellect for all this is far greater than that which any of us possesses, yet there is the correlation in this. The way for us in that we are created, is no less, and just as our reason enables thought, so it requires conformity to its rules.

The way is tight and narrow as mathematics, precision engineering or artistic architecture in its toils, where vision makes utility and beauty together, or whatever other feature is in view. The lush expansiveness of the creative spirit, for products, is always the correlative of the intensive mind, whether its works be more or less conscious and conspicuous: it is there.

The codes, as in the DNA, which as in any other pragmatic pursuit, give the orders, here programmatic in form, are associated with the organisation in which they operate, so giving the means, the institutive power, while all are fashioned in one multi-partite whole for the simultaneity and correlation required. So does the functional multiplicity of provision act, just as prior to this logically, does the constitutive power give actuality to thought, ready for application. This is both for creation, and within it, at the stringent rational level in man. Whether in our form, or beyond it, there are the ingredients which reason requires. Means and shapes may vary, and in spirit form is geometrically insignificant; but the rational specifications do not vary, nor does causation take leave of absence from thought itself (cf. Causes, above, and SMR Chs. 1, 3, 10, Reason, Revelation and the Redeemer).

As in all design of any height and moment within the affairs of the human spirit, there are the orders (however derived, from greed or vision), there are the means for their execution, the correlative forces into which they descend, that they might be effected and there is likewise the cognitive overview, which seeks to endue forces and programs with an executive relevance, so that the RESULT is CONSTITUTED, not a mere composition of bits, but a purpose built integrality, which functions AS ONE WHOLE.

In this case, our own KIND, the marvel is this, that not only can we UNDERSTAND the rationality of many of the processes which allow us to be rational, grasping, seeking, striving to gain awareness of such things. This is not all; for we can also by use, practising our powers, find the relationship of such rationality to our own spirits, drives, desires, dreams, vision, and experience the splendour of imaginative conception, be it glorious or horrendous. It is then that the utter simplicity of man's position becomes quite overpowering: here he is made in all this conceptual dynamic, with mind at work to the uttermost: yet in his present and unredeemed state as a race, man in his mind, by his spirit, is set to ignore it, even to distort it. Yet for all that, in mercy and by grace, he may yet seek and call on his Maker, if by any means He may be found.

To that we shall return, but the Bible, as has been repeatedly shown, not only in rationality has uniqueness in meeting validity's requirements as we seek, but it has a splendour of verification thrust upon us,  which comes from its again unique system of REQUESTING TEST of its rational presentations, to see if they do or do not surpass anything else which has come from any other source (cf. Isaiah 41, 43, 48 and see The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy).

Let us then revert to our construction and its increasingly visible components, as when one generation gives birth to the next in procreation, so that the nature of the instructions appear.

Orders, then, these do not come from the wind; they are not to be found in the sea, in the planets, for these do not issue them; nor does the sky induce them, like rain. Systems do what they are, and the creator MAKES them so, in order that they can and do so act. There is no mystery, nor does any evidence contradict, nor would man be tenable if it did; for his entire logical structure would fall into folly, in complete contrast to his actual ability. He would explode just as he would not 'arise' in the first place, by such contradiction, needing always the power that has always given him the facility to be otherwise, a commanded set of systems, fraught with integrality, mutual in co-ordinate functionality, each one enabled to investigate itself personally, and to will aright or amiss, to collide with or co-operate with the field into which he is set. 

God, says Ecclesiastes 7:29, has made man upright, but he has sought out many devices! He has made many 'inventions'. Alas, his co-ordinate power to imagine becomes by misuse, an inordinate power to delude.

Thus, the 'explosion' noted above, in terms of reason and viability, is precisely, and all but literally, that to which man is coming as he increasing, in national units, scorns his actual, verified and necessary origin, and seeking on fallen bases, amid the ruins of aborted logic, tries to ... actually LIVE! It is like someone trained for veterinary surgery, whose studies have been in the realm of the poetry of Keats, suddenly coming from the university of his scholarship, and trying to carve up dogs, horses or deal with animal rheumatism.

Explosions since 1945 have come in all but comic profusion, and the 'profundity' of man's cultural thought is making his tenure on this planet precisely as tenuous as one would expect. The most sophisticated structures of his abilities, can lie in ruins in a moment, because some spiritual madness possesses someone, or a few hundred people. He is increasingly unable to match the follies of his own race, because his presuppositions are becoming so ludicrous, his false prophets so fey or febrile, that being based on such things, is to be unbased, unstable and preposterous.

Hence as to the indignities of ruin, the ravages of folly, when little forces of small intrinsic power mock at the covenant's of civilisation, and show to man his madness, these now proceed on all sides. It is so whether from Islam, Communism (now past its prime and gone to fat) or other erratic Earth Charter, or Human Unity movements, religious syncretisms, based on desire, empty of ground, humanism with its self-assessment based on nothing, or any other sphere of insidious substitution of dream for doing.

ANY riotous refusal to face facts, often associated in the past with with the furious or spurious passions of youth when it moves into the many fallacies which beckon, now become a preserve to be sought by adult minds on an increasing scale. Thus they move with increasing swagger on the one hand, and fear on the other,  to their undoing. As this is just what our race is moving massively to do,   instead of entering into reverence, work and realism in the realm God made, it is sure to bring a penalty upon itself. Even individuals, sufficiently equipped, and not very numerous, might now with increasing availability of power, bring such burdens on man.

If it becomes social, however, as it does, the certainties interact and proliferate. If it becomes national, they become, as in the USSR where up to 30,000,000 deaths or disjunctions of life have been attributed to Stalin, or as with Mao in good contest with Stalin for China's abortion, one with the other and each an example to yet more, a maelstrom hard to realise. It soon provides for a penalty of perversion of a scope so great, as to make more of Shaw's whimsical concept of the earth as the madhouse for Mars, than he ever had reason to suppose!

Such is the result of unreason, irrationality, the routing of scientific method^*1C, the bold face set against the One whose revelation reason refuses to avoid, of the power of God maligned, of the presence of God denied or trivialised: and this with an increasingly audacious, supervisory power on the part of the nations of this earth.

One referred a short time ago to Ecclesiastes 7:29 - that man was made upright but has sought out many devices! (cf. Sparkling Life ... Ch. 4).

These devices of original thought, irrational rashness and polluting visions or dreams based on nothing and leading to massive exterminations within our ravaged race now proceed to their due destiny. God has been immensely, categorically patient, just as Peter declared would be the case in II Peter 3:9. He has not rushed the result of ruin, and the return of the Lord: no, said Peter, that would not be, for He is not willing that any should perish. The disposition of His love is that all should come to repentance. He does nothing to abort this, much to implement it; but since the spirit of man would fail before him, if the matter continued on and on, there is an end. The end comes; the beginning came: so what is new ? The grace of God, the ineffable grace, this is ever new. It is not however the same as fecklessness. That, it seems to be a feature much desired by man, and that in contravention of his own design!

THE PARALLELS

of Clarity and Confusion

Moving from Myth to the Steps of the Almighty

Meanwhile, however, let us pursue the interesting parallel between the naturalistic model noted above, and the realities of creation.

Even in naturalism, there are the first products, and where it bothers about scientific method, first types - and when you face the realities of definition^*2 - first designs, and these are equipped in life, with types or reproduction facilities.

Each therefore has PROGRESS in giant steps, as seen where myth is not a priori mandatory^*3. It is seen whether in

	the profound differentiation of basic designs,
	the acute specialisation of various endowments,
	the flurry of the corps within the KIND without apology for profusion, so strongly attested by Stephen Jay Gould and others (cf. *3 below),
	the miracles gratuitously required for transition of a cosmos of considerations in any given KIND, without drag, lag on the way before functionality, or death due to the dysfunction, while awaiting later development, and that from no source, itself mysteriously equipped for all that, with the customary code-carrying expertise.

Creationism has major steps; and the Bible has so stated for some 3500 years, precise and particular (cf. *2 below).

It provides for these, however, with adequate formative and formulating differentials, as required by reason and verified results^*4, derived from what carries such powers. His name is God, His works declare Him consistently, insistently, pervasively (cf. TMR Chs. 1, 4, The gods of naturalism have no go!). As to this, not only does it satisfy reason, but reason satisfies it; for to revelation it drives the reasoning mind, and from revelation we find the verification to which nothing else even approximates: testable propositions in depth and in detail consistently confirmed (SMR).

While thus, there are some similarities, where on occasion even naturalism notes some of the observations and pursues them, there are profound differentials, where in divine creationism, verification and validity alike escape from the maw of the crushing weight which naturalism imposes on rationality and man alike.

Each, again, moves towards a schema.  Naturalism looks to man taking over, to become the inheritor of what is the labour of the hidden fairy godmother (without a name), which has always been working in the wings, instructing process to have itself nicely tagged out. He then arrives to make prodigious efforts to control this "thing", stretching its creative wings - though it is deemed not to be there, making all things - though it is not acknowledged, dangerous in its thrusts - though it has no being with which to make them! Such is fantasy, a world of its own.

Yet this scenario desired by many, is fatuous. Man to the rescue, do the opposite to what 'the thing' does, and subverting its imagined methods, secure better results! It is worthy of the worst ranting thrust of an angry coach in the middle of a disastrous game of football (which itself seems increasingly in danger of being spoiled for skill and finesse, by intimidatory tactics and survival concepts, rich in blood, weak in instruction).

Alas theory must now take wings, and peril prevail. What then appears the cultural concept for the empirically minded ? Keep the fairy godmother in the wings, pretend it is not there, and imagine that the thing which made intelligence is unintelligent or easily tricked, and take over its efforts and by contradicting them, secure their finale! What an operatic myth is this confused thought and anti-empirical folly!

Observation shows that the 'thing' which requires control is not an -ism in its workings, but man! The implicit power and intelligence is not 'a thing', for that kind of intelligence and plan-producer, mind-maker and spirit instituter is infinitely less 'a thing' that the man who would so term him, in senile-seeming derision! Man is growing old, and his own creation vexes him. He wants it all and moves thus to the next 'step' in 'progress', the inane supposition that he can do something in the trend and nature of things, by power and force and cunning and guile, by subtlety and management techniques and CONTROL, opposing the supposed bent of things, improving the result, allegedly itself gained from the bent.

Controlling what gave him rationality however, by aborting its imagined efforts is about as wise as seeking to control a fire by throwing gasoline on it. If the 'thing' were so stupid, then what is man ? If man's intelligence can displace it, what is the power which could construct it doing ? taking a rest! The effrontery is equalled only by the irrationality.

What is REQUIRED is, so far from being a thing, the ground FOR matter, hence not matter, but what is named SPIRIT for the distinction, and here spirit of incandescent intelligence and  total knowledge, to outwit, displace or control whom would be as easy as for a mosquito, when seeking to control a bushfire by beating its wings in the searing flame. It is worse; for at least the mosquito, though puny in insignificance for all relevant power,  would be in the same material realm; and the two could have some kind of contact in their voyagings!

Thus, instead of the vague romancing feelings about 'something' to which naturalism sometimes shrugs itself in the midst of its negative feelings about itself, all too justified, there is the God of creation, not at all vague, insistently specified by His works, precise to perfection, knowledgeable by demonstration, eternal without basis, for without Him before all delimitation begins, there is nothing from which it may come. There is then God; and there is man, renegade and characterisable as a race, likewise, by HIS works!

What, then, is needed, and must be that we might be, and what needs solution in realism is not nowhere and nothing, a sort of prayer before creation made by what is not there to be allowed to found existence and start ontology. Nor is it to be found in 'nature' in which this astounding feat of creation is given thrust into being, when it is in fact given authority and power to exist as what it is, ranging from the power and the information for the formation of atoms in their courses, electrons and protons, neutrons and mesons, the quantitative realms of ordered space, to the qualitative regions of ordered vitality, with the meticulous organisational genius attested in life.

Alas, for the dreamers, such power to make itself is nowhere found in nature as founder, for it founders when any such brilliance is sought from it now, by any test and in any way whatsoever: and indeed is a wholly dysfunctional figment of disordered thought on the part of those who seek to impel 'her' to prodigies of creation, or any evidence of such powers; for the evolutionists thrust at her, to make her bear, like one beating a virgin to obtain a child. It is  as if a car were a factory, or a building an architect, so great is their confusion (cf. Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Ch. 3).

So they goad in vain, prod without purpose and exhaust patience without result (cf. Creation, Endnote *2).

But then, they go away, futile, frustrated and thwarted, like disappointed wolves, from the inert prey. Such have been the dreamers, victims of disorderly thoughts and erratic desires from the days of Jeremiah and long before, till this; for as Jeremiah puts it of then renegade Israel, it is alienated from truth, from the Lord who made them:

"saying to a tree, 'You are my father,' and to a stone, 'You gave birth to me!' " (Jeremiah 2:27).

And why was - and is - this so ? It is because, in principle and in passion at the last analysis, "they have turned their back to Me, and not their face," the prophet continues. It is always hard to see someone when you turn your back to him.

However, this is a problem not of logic, but of will; nor of powers of observation, but of directing the eyes where what is to be seen, is present!

What then is needed is not the dysfunctional idol of disordered thought, 'nature' personified and made to 'strive' to 'foresee' and to 'envisage', to 'find' and to 'create' which alas, it has neither equipment nor strength, mind nor creativity, fashion or facility, passion or principle to do, neither does it provide verification to see it so perform, nor indication to show it  move or even twiddle its toes as if to walk. Instead, it is like a fallen idol where the temple worshippers look, hopefully but in vain, to see any sign of actual life in its own right, to be and to do what they would desire of it.

It is not nothing that is required! What is inexorably needed in solution is not to be found in its precincts or its shrines, or those of any phase of creation; but in sin against the Producer, cavils against the Creator, rebellion against the Manufacturer's verified and alone valid handbook^*5 the Bible, and a return to both reality and realism.

The result of failing to do so is not in fact a commendable and massive mustering of human resources to overcome the continually intractable problems which heel-kicking colt, man, finds in ignoring the instructions that go with the package, the supernally and continually attested Bible. Rebellion before light, before the attested, verified, validated word of God set with the fallen creation called man, like a blow-up boat by the survivors of a stricken craft, it is a fatal project. It is not this which is required.

Nor is it some ever inanely glorified push by man, to amplify his failed but long attempted putsch against his own Maker. It is not this, not some dream of valiant man striding in his vulnerability into the recesses of the universe, conquering and to conquer.

That has always been the lust from Eden on, and much exhibited in the Greek story of Icarus, whose waxed wings melted and left him to drown, when he flew too near the sun; but the remedy for flighty man is this: to be poor in spirit, loving in disposition, repentant in heart, realistic in procedure, prudent in practice and wise in heart, counselled by the Lord. This leads to the Redeemer of whom Job spoke thousands of years before Christ, declaring this:

"I KNOW that my Redeemer lives, and that He will stand at last upon the earth;
and after my skin is destroyed, this I know, that in my flesh shall I see God,
whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes will behold, and not another."

This tractability, this teachability, this susceptibility to reason, is necessary, after all a small step, but one inevitable. As the Lord declares, "Come let us reason together, for though you sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow" (Isaiah 1:18), and again,

                           And the coastlands shall wait for His law."

He proceeds, as so often in Isaiah, to specify the works of the One who consummates the many fulfilled prophecies and overviews the Lord provided to Israel, and through them to us, the Messiah, right through Isaiah 49-55, 60-61. This He does,  so that for all time the same control of history from the sublime to the minute might be scientifically attested, that men might believe and put their faith in Him, and not in mirages, myths without support, the only power of which is to abort when questions are asked, to be still-born when power is required (cf. Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Ch. 3, Wake Up World, Chs. 4-6).

God however, not satisfied with regaling the Jews continually through the prophets, with His will, word and predictions, retrodictions and appeals, has placed for all time the systematic accounts of things, whether in the prediction of 700 B.C. of Cyrus to come over a century later, to deliver them from Babylon to which they would go in predicted punishment for their sins, for 70 years, or other matters arising constantly! (cf. Isaiah 41:21-45:6).

Poverty of spirit, willingness to learn, to observe, to be accurate, to verify, to seek and thus to find, and indeed, to find the Lord, this is a feature unique in this world's created kinds, secured for man. Because he is so produced that he CAN disobey, may feel himself disinclined, may yield to obtrusive and foolish passions, but MAY instead read the Handbook provided with the manufactured equipment, in this case himself, he is singularly blessed, and that in entire parallel to the exquisite marvels inherent in his construction. Yet it is with love as well as wisdom that this provision is made.

Man, thus, equipment indeed, but made as a person to boot, may even through this way and word, speak to the Producer personally: and this is a resource to be used. Neglect here is like any other neglect of what a given function requires - and ultimately, it is ruinous. You lose function, power, precision and the necessary guidance for your operation and felicity: and you lose it for what at this KIND level, becomes LIFE and LIVING.

Christ came not least that we should live more abundantly (John 10:10), and in the light (John 8:12) - not exist in the shadows, with partial paralysis of our powers through misguided separation from the Spirit of Him who made us.

Since, in observed, experimental and indisputable fact, mankind in his nations almost universally refuses this, in practice putting man and his limited internal machinations above and over his Maker, there is therefore and indeed an END. There is an end,  just as there was a beginning to all these quantified qualities, dispositions, to meet and match these command units, who using the magnificent liberties added to their brilliant construction, in the case of man, both can and do issue their own commands. This they do,  not merely to seek to deploy the nature in which they are so beautifully placed, but which they so evilly ruin, inventing for themselves special non-hearing aids, to prevent their hearing those of their Maker, but for themselves. Thus, they make these -isms, from evolutionism to communism, as if demented, and die in teeming millions for their presumptuous, arrogant and ultimately farcical errors^*6.

The three major laws of science merely stress the obvious (*2A). It is to denaturing, diminution, decrease in the wearing ways of a creation now ageing. It is to ruin because of summary rebellion against the services and servicing of the Maker that mankind moves, like the sodden drunkard, ever unwilling till be becomes even unable, to lift his head to examine anything but the lust of his passion, and the ingredients that originally led to it: alas, not at all original in the end!

It is to this ruin from reckless renegacy; or to the acceptance of the Maker's restorative remedy that man comes: it is to this ultimatum, not only as an individual, but as a race that man now reaches manifestly in bulk, en bloc. As for so long, individually, then nationally, now it is internationally, globally.

THE STEPPE OF JUDGMENT

AND THE MOUNTAIN OF MERCY

If this restoration is, on the whole, 'not on', then judgment as in any other abused product, is 'on'.

There is no escape but in the very reason why the Maker has spared His renegade product, man, mad with power, and raging in atrocities innumerable, from anti-Handbook solutions an escapee, whether from academic or religions 'false prophets' such as Jeremiah so lampooned, rebuked and exposed in Ch. 23. It is in mercy, divine, inalienable from the Gospel, itself immutable, given by God for the case which from the first He foreknew, providing the Lamb from the foundation of the world, choosing His people before it (Ephesians 1:4,  Revelation 13:8, Isaiah 46:10),  declaring however for our benefit not least, this

(23:18-25 - colours added to aid discernment of points here most relevant):

                           "I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in My name,
                             saying,   ‘I have dreamed, I have dreamed!’ "

In the end of the Age, when history is very ripe, we learn from Jeremiah,

this phenomenon of

	the false prophet,
	the runner for God, coming but not sent, the fiasco formers,
	the false apostles,
	the spawn of the evil one transforming himself into appearance as an angel of light (II Corinthians 11),
	the fraudulent spiritual ambassadors,
	the ones using the name of God in vain, pretending to be sent, but not more or less than fakes,  spurious, clouds without water, waves raging out their shame (Jude and II Peter):

it will be rife.

That is precisely what Christ declared in Matthew 24:24, and II Peter 2 shows us, as with II Timothy 3,4, and I Timothy 4.

Our time at the end of the Age (Answers to Questions Ch. 5), brings the assorted acute forms of the chronic problems which for some millenia have preceded (cf. Matthew 24, Luke 21, II Peter 2-3, Ezekiel 13, Deuteronomy 13). Small wonder is it  therefore that NOT ONLY is there this running down, energically, environmentally, and the simultaneous running up of the bill for radioactivity, but there is the devastating degeneration in education (cf. Lead us not into Educational Temptation!), with its products, jointly issuing from sinful hearts, educational aggravations, State intrusion into parental discipline (cf. Mystery of Iniquity) and idolatrous dreams concerning man. Hence comes a new era for youth, a development from the cultural past. Self-defeating as such blindness is, these mentors and tormentors of man, in their folly, they are merely adding to the cynicism or frustration, for many of their victims, and of those who observe them.

In this and many related ways, variously, comes the last phase of the degeneration of much of the race (cf. News 121, 122, TMR Ch. 8, News 82), as to the degradation and listless hedonism, or spurious, furious passions of the young, whether political, physiological, idolatrous or psychological.

Small wonder Hebrews 2:3 from afar, speaks to one and to all declaring this:

"How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation;
which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord,
and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him;
God also bearing them witness, both with signs and wonders,
and with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost, according to his own will?"

The end is a Producer-Product confrontation - and there are many preliminaries on the way, like so many lusty foothills before the final range, and peak, from which all is to be seen, and admired or not, according to the direction of one's vision (cf. DIZZY  DASHES,  HEADY CLASHES AND THE BRILLIANT HARMONY OF INEVITABLE TRUTH Ch. 6).

This confrontation is so, for fallen man, unlike other products on this earth, has and meets reason, is endued with responsibility and finds results under the heavens of accountability. Vast misuse of truth and of each other is a fact, and no fiction will ever dismiss it.

Only pardon will ever do so.

It is

	not the prodigious efforts, then, of man,
	but the magnificent energies and labours of God, as in the institutive and constitutive acts of creation, and the restoration by crucifixion of the sent Christ,
	which are in view.

That foretold for millenia and performed at the stated date in prophetic instruction^*7, in Christ, and Him crucified, resurrected, remains, like the creation itself, operative and confirmed. In the end, the creation is dismissed, whether in material things, to an end, or in man, to judgment: where he is not received into pardon and protection. In all of this, the Cross remains, sound attestation of the love and practical performance of God, who, having made so much, did more to preserve it, where it might be preserved.

Thus there is a vast and all but irretrievable misconception in man in this Age, as he approaches judgment like a lamb walking fondly to the bared dental work of a slavering wolf; but the wolf, it is not some rapacious apparition, for it is his own sin, ready to consume him, as he allows its ravages the last word, and seeks to trust in himself and his own puny powers. If the devil lusts for him, his own sin no less! As to man's powers, to great in prospect, so small when sundered:  after all, they merely unravel more and more of the things which constitute creation, like a student of art working for years to get some idea of what Raphael did, without in the least attaining to the power on canvas of that creative artist!

There was indeed a beginning, but it was contrived, before it arrived; and it was summoned before it came; it was not like a causeless fairy tale, from nothing at all for no reason whatever. There is likewise,  indeed an end, but it is not in the profound and heroic resources of fallen man, inhabiting fiction and witnessing his apotheosis, controlling all things by the sheer brilliance of his deluded intellect and that fairy tale for adults, mentality.

It is a PRODUCT end before the PRODUCER who began it. It is answerable to Him. The steps which were taken TO that end (like the disease elements, shown in a detailed prognosis for a cancer patient, of what is to be expected as his pathology progresses) are scheduled in the Handbook, the Bible (Answers to Questions Ch. 5). By checking them simply, we find them elemental, dramatic, cogent and mutually involved, in detail; they come remorselessly as history progresses, like the case of a man living on his capital, without power to produce. They come to the end of the tale; and the divine specifications for that end show the matter about complete.

Before the end, therefore, such pardon on the premisses, promises and performance of the Creator in Christ, as may be obtained, should be. He is liberal to the uttermost, and free past any (Isaiah 55), and indeed protests as there seen, at the human desire to pay for redemption which is free, being paid for with a price divine (Galatians 3).

Grace, ineffable grace has provided under new management, that of God Himself instead of sin, the answer; for the management of man has become an unmanning manoeuvre, an intoxicating potion of power and pretence. For this miscreancy, the answer, as for the failed company of man, is needed. It is available. With this divine gift, much follows. There is then:

	Peace, ineffable peace, which is so because God is boundless and in His provisions for pardon there is nothing left to disturb the natural state of felicity in His presence; and
	grace, ineffable grace, for there is no bar to His removal of barriers, and no requirement for His acceptance, for what is worthy of acceptance is this, that Christ died for sinners, and this is the way (I Timothy 1:15, John 3:16, Titus 2:11ff., 3:3ff.).

He did not die as an example, for no example heals; nor as a contribution, for hell is never sated by contributions, but only by what justice provides to extinguish a guilt as high as the heavens, and as low as hell. Those whose pride forbids that they acknowledge their own improper ownership, in practical terms, of themselves as they have fortified themselves in their own conclusions, are like those concussed. They do not observe that the CHIEF sin is NOT to be in Christ from the first, bought by the price He provided. He did not even COME to redeem the righteous, but sinners. The self-righteous are not even RELEVANT to His mission; and yet there is no other name given to man under heaven, by which he MUST be saved, but that of Christ (Acts 4:11-12). It is not an option, but a necessity. Heaven is too full of perfection to import the slightly healed, the self-sustaining or those who can invent their own terms, thus in rebellion mixed with effrontery, audacity without awe at the truth.

All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God; and if one electrical short-circuit can, despite all the correct wiring and construction underlying, wholly ruin the work, how much more does a spiritual short-circuit cut!

Man, being a personal product, when re-united with the God of all pity and comfort, appreciates both the ineffable peace and the ineffable grace which is in the hand of the Lord, and to which He is willing to restore; and as a son of Truth, the name of his Maker, Jesus Christ who became incarnate in order to save some, and invite all with passionate intensity and divine immensity: returned man relishes. This becomes a special delight, in the midst of his restoration. However, if he insists on making himself an illegitimate, by his own divorce from the hand of the divine, then he wallows in his own blood: as Christ put it, "If you do not believe that I am He, you will die in your sins!" (John 8:24).

Yet, this is not to be considered aridly, as if out of the very context of mercy, as if God had not acted IN PERSON. Thus, on the other hand, it is as an adopted child of God, returned from being distant in a far off land, to being present, as an immigrant back to his origin and base, that man comes home, redeemed to his native land, the Creator-Redeemer, Commander and Saviour. It is to the acme of naturalness, because at last  the supernatural grace is both realised and relished. It is a homecoming in this, that it is to his source, to what is provided and has from the first been his proper place, that he comes. Home has no barriers in the divine mercy; for the entry cost for the proligate, whether in spirit or mind or body or any combination, is covered for the contrite, available for those seeking, freely credited to those taking Christ on His own terms, His word the truth, His way the highway.

When Christ announced, "It is finished," it was to guarantee the credit; nor is it to be repaid, for it is freely given (Romans 3:23ff.). To the Christian now back in his spiritual homeland, the realisation now grows: Freely you have received, freely give!

It is as in Isaiah 55:1-4:

                           A leader and commander for the people."

That, from so long ago foretold, and now for so long fulfilled, is as it was so be, and now continues. It is the basis of the Gospel, which like the Christ Himself, does not change (Galatians 1:6-9, Hebrews 13:8, Ephesians 1:10). It is He who is now, as always both before and after He came to this earth, the FAITHFUL WITNESS (Revelation 1:5), THE FIRSTBORN FROM THE DEAD AND THE RULER OVER THE KINGS OF THE EARTH.

He has in this way, never been silent since creation was, and remains commander; nor has He altered His views, for whom time is an invention, and the task of providing saving truth is the work of love now long completed, applied to many, and soon to be consummated in its final episodes (Revelation 5, 14, 19-21).

The way you know, said Christ, and it is He, who having come and sent His Spirit to His people, is as near as the heart, but further than the most distant star from those who continue to desire to delete the operations of deity (cf. Hebrews 10:26).

Not the smouldering candles of human presumption, corrosive irrationality and spiritual indulgence, but the bright shining light of God (John 8:12, 9:4-5) is the need.

More visible than any lighthouse, and requiring that one come to find it and follow it, even to the ravines of Calvary and up to the resurrection on the first day of the week, and appropriate His gift of eternal life, is this Gospel.

It brings man to his Lord, in whose sacrificial intensity is the immensity of our pardon and the wonder of the END, which in this case, becomes the BEGINNING of eternal blessedness, nestling where love is, in the company of God (Isaiah 40:10, I Thessalonians 5:9-10). The children, they have the light and feed on the pastures of His word, which in His bright light, more glorious in the sunset colours of Calvary, are so plentiful and available. They feed, they taste, and it is good (Psalm 34:8 cf. Revelation 7:13ff.).

In the end,

	after the test is over, the trial concluded,
	with the superabundant kindness of God made available to all,
	and none failing to find it except there is preference in the very face of light for darkness,
	and that, in the knowledge before all time of God Himself,
	who Himself chooses in Christ His own people (Ephesians 1:4); and
	after love is fulfilled in magnificent passion and enormous practicality
	even to the point of Calvary, following the resurrection preliminaries as with Lazarus,
	and the whole cornucopia of mercy in Christ Jesus whose own resurrection fulfils to the uttermost the provisions for salvation:

then there is peace and purity, truth and goodness. Then there is rest in the presence of God and in the divinely adopted family now with Him.

The consummation thus depicts the prognosis of wonder, pathology having been sent far off, and lies aborted.

Now grace there abounds like cold in the Arctic, heat at the Equator, gold in the gold quartz, coal in the mine, ocean in its quarters, the stars in their courses. Then is to be found the graceful quietness and blessedness which is God's, and which belongs where love is, and truth is vindicated. Now is the reality able to shine in the appearance; and all the concourse of peace and beauty, nobility and joy, truth and righteousness, humility and grace, can appear in the gracefulness of goodness and the blessedness of that naturalness which the Supernatural God can imbue into what are then, in the realm of their new belonging, the very children of the place!

Such is the word of Revelation 7, of 22:

"They shall neither hunger anymore nor thirst anymore; the sun shall not strike them, nor any heat; for the Lamb who is in the midst of the throne will shepherd them and lead them to living fountains of waters. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes."

 

"I, Jesus, have sent My angel to testify to you these things in the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, the Bright and Morning Star.

"And the Spirit and the bride say, 'Come!' And let him who hears say, 'Come!' And let him who thirsts come. Whoever desires, let him take the water of life freely."

NOTES

*1A

See:

The Desire of the Nations and the Crystalline Fire of the Faith Ch. 2, Epilogue

Little Things  Ch.  3 (esp. *3),

Beauty of Holiness  Ch.    4,

Dancers, Prancers, Lancers and Answers Chs.    3,  5

 

*1C

SCIENTIFIC METHOD, SATANIC METHOD

AND THE MODEL OF SALVATION

*1

EXTENSION ON COVERAGE OF:

DEFINITION OF DESIGN, DESIGNATION OF CREATION

 

See:

 

SMR pp. 113-116, 141, 211,

Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Ch. 3,

Defining Drama Ch. 3,

Dancers, Prancers, Lancers and Answers Ch. 5,

Christ's Ineffable Peace and Grace ... Ch. 5

The Wit and Wisdom of the Word of God, the Bible True to Test Ch. 2,
esp. *1 where extensive coverage is to be found.

The Pride of Life, the Prince of Life and the Destiny of Man Ch. 5: with

TMR Ch.  1,   A Spiritual Potpourri Ch. 4,  5,  Ch. 8 with Ch. 7, SMR Ch. 2.

 

From The Pride of Life loc. cit., , we have this reminder of logical fact.

Just as a brilliant mathematical proof, or presentation is not NON-EXISTENT unless you see it being made, its standing not diminished by your knowledge or otherwise of its past and method of compilation, and stands on its own merit, so here: the designs are independent for definitional purposes of who did them, or when, or how. They have the criteria of designs more than any material creation of man. Hence to deny them that title means we must deny it to all of human productions likewise, alter the definition of design and perform marvels of obfuscatory distancing from all the required canons of formal logic, sliding into surreptitious irrationality. The alternative is simple: this is design.

Distaste becomes disgrace when, as here, it miscalls; and miscalled it is as if dishonesty were the height of rectitude, or failure the acme of success. So does a whole generation proceed to its increasingly obvious doom, fey with the fairies instead of ruthlessly realistic about what confronts it, and soon, the One who will confront it.

These aspects are developed in detail throughout the above references.

*2A

On space, see A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-3, and in particular this point. On religions using violence even in the arena of faith, see SMR pp. 50ff., 1074-1084, 1186ff.,
More Marvels ... Ch. 4 and Divine Agenda Ch. 6.

*2B

See TMR Ch. 1, and Ch. 8, including the three laws, at these   sites, and in Ch. 1 at this point.

*2

The Defining  Drama ... Ch.   10,  cf. SMR pp. 179ff. and 482ff., Dayspring.

*3

See Secular Myth and Sacred Truth.

See also SMR Ch. 2, including p.106, from which area, comes a quotation below:

Nor does this irrationalistic or gradualistic case fare better, as was shown at the School, if we turn to fossils. Professor George Gaylord Simpson of Harvard University has declared:

GAPS AMONG KNOWN ORDERS, CLASSES AND PHYLA ARE SYSTEMATIC AND ALMOST ALWAYS LARGE (*11).

Indeed, confronted by the stark reality of the evidential contradictions of organic evolution, he has espoused a rather desperate theory of quantum movement, evolutionary progress by leaps. However this simply becomes creation, unbecomingly shorn of its name; so that we turn back to where we began, before pseudo-science soared too high for its wings.

The fact of systematic gaps in the record of past life, when arrayed in some sort of supposed order, is precisely what one would expect from a creationist basis. Verifying, as is the dust-layer on the moon by its startling thinness - it is just what the creationist might rather expect. Surprising to the infidel, it yet has the discipline of order to the mind of the believer.

Biologically, without assuming the extravaganza of something such as a crypto-magical movement from marvel to marvel of design... by some hidden, automated and stored programming (which some would seem more readily to imply (*12) than overtly to declare) - a rather than a cyclic program, alas without evidence (*9): what then ? How do the competitive explanations deal with the facts ?

This series of systematic gaps is then the prediction, specifically, of  fiat  creationism. That is, it is precisely what God's let it be done, creation clearly asserted, from the start. And where is that in terms of scientific theory ? It is simply that this is verified and the evolutionary dream of Darwin is not. That is the first lesson of the many, for the many compelled at last to surrender the poetical myth of gradualistic evolution.

In terms of logic and evidence in happy harmony, it is a unique verification. If there were no gradual change from species to species, order to order and so on: why then, there would be large gaps, certainly there would be systematic gaps. These are found: the creationist claim is verified thereby, in a precise, ordered and logical way, without ad hoc tempests or the ludicrous mental torture of diehards.

In the line of verification, then, that is the current end in terms of scientific method, of the theory of organic evolution, of gradualistic chance 'creation'. It has been a great waste of time, though not for the devil. Its verification both competitively with creation, and actually, is negative. Yet the theory wallows on, like an opium smoking teenager, indulged by doting parents. (Cf. pp. 251-252N infra.)

 

From the same volume (SMR) , Ch. 2, pp. 236ff., we have this further admission from Simpson:

It is as if the curtain were rung down suddenly on the stage where all the leading roles were taken by reptiles, especially dinosaurs, in great numbers and bewildering variety, and rose again immediately to reveal the same setting but an entirely new cast, a cast in which dinosaurs do not appear at all, other reptiles are supernumeraries, and all the leading parts are played by mammals of sorts barely hinted at in the preceding acts (from p. 42 of Simpson's Life Before Man).

 

From SMR, Ch. 2, pp. 216ff., we have this correlative account:

Change that is an advance in kind (indisputable vertical movement in genetic structure and information content) is in fact simply never seen, in terms of objective criteria. The case simply collapses in practice, scientifically speaking. The Biblical statement that the creatures bore offspring or new generations 'after their kind' is not only a statistical, historical and structural procedure, but also a programmed and even editorially conditioned event. Observation, at the heart of science, as the century progresses, simply confirms, and this with amazing intricacies, the reality of 'kinds' in theory, in program, as well as in fact, verifying this Biblical statement as design-conditioned, gene-directed, as well as historically evident.

As to the historical macro-overview, it fits to perfection with the dynamisms of cell-life as now being investigated in micro-biology, leading alike to a highly mutant format for evolutionary theory, as Denton puts it, itself in crisis, and to frustration with an unco-operative fossil record.

Thus we meet not only the palaeontological data such as are indicated in this work (e.g. pp. 105, 111, 153, EXTENSION D, *18 and pp. 204 infra, and pp. 308 ff., Chapter 7, Section 10 infra), but fascinating exhibitions of unintimidated evidence such as are cited by Gish (Evolution: The Challenge of the Fossil Record, pp. 235-236, 244).

The fossil record with its abrupt transitions offers no support for change... (Stephen Jay Gould, in Natural History, vol. 6, pp. 22-30 - 1977) and this: Missing links in the sequence of fossil evidence were a worry to Darwin. He felt sure they would eventually turn up, but they are still missing and seem likely to remain so... (Sir Edmund Leach, Nature, 293:19, 1981- to add to the words of Nilsson, Goldschmidt, Løvtrup, Thompson and Simpson - q.v..)

Dr Colin Patterson (senior Palaeontologist, British Museum of Natural History, in his Keynote Address at the American Museum of Natural History in 1981) adds this:

"Question is: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing, any one thing that is true ? I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time and eventually one person said, "I do know one thing - it ought not to be taught in high school."

The genetic and logical realities are so well reflected, but from the standpoint of observational data (which match to perfection, in total synthetic verification), we have this also quite clear from Stephen Jay Gould in Paleobiology, vol. 6 (1), January 1980, p. 127:

The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.

You get different designs of some similarity but no apparent transition: this is the normal product from a creative mind. Yet while we find this commonly, normatively, continually, both readily understandable and observable; and while the means for the magical myth of instituting self-design by some unthinking, non-conceptualising, non-programming system, are unobservable and the concept is wholly alien to the result: this is proposed. (Refer pp. 252A-J infra.)

Indeed, perhaps the most hilarious of the confrontations between fact and the fictitious splendours of romanticising evolutionary theory comes in Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould, when his eyes were at least temporarily half-opened.

Thus, in Wonderful Life, we find he cried aloud (p. 227), asking what in heaven's name was the answer to such a situation as what he deemed in his Burgess shale deposits to be, the sudden proliferation of endless-seeming, varied and clustered designs. Indeed, the LOSS of the vast majority of designs over time, when their aggregation is ostensibly in view similarly distressed him, and that not for no reason!  (cf. p. 233).

For this, see Wake Up World! ... Ch. 6 (preferably in conjunction with Chs.  4 and   5 (op.cit).

When a man, not evidently too fond of heaven, is crying in its name for explanation of what is caused by his irrationality in this very field, his strange turning from the very truth to which he was evidentially and with amazement exposed, then irony has its masterpiece. But then, in this field of the pathology of man's spirit, a racial phenomenon removed only by redemption, for its full healing, this sort of irony is de rigueur!

It may be well to provide  a short citation from Wake Up World! Ch. 6, concerning the world of Gould, itself as much an invention as that of Wodehouse, in this regard:

In another world, Mr Gould, your nature might be programmed as you suggest, though it would be an enormously inefficient way of doing things. Indeed, in another world with inbuilt provisions for miracles by constant decree, your little worm might be the flagship possessing the imagination of its beholder, seen in your volume, as the crucial flag carrier which brings in a flush of impotence, the results of limitless power. Wriggle by wriggle he makes genius look like a dim-witted, backward Primary kid, by comparison. Entombed in his being, is the lustre of the limitless, equipped beyond all measure with a mind for kind, power to perform, capacity to encode, chance a casualty, principle a prefect. A network of enablement switches with direct access to the Almighty might be presented, with a genie to use them adroitly. We might find these, and watch the genie at work.

In another world, it might be so.

In this one, it is not so. Nature has a nature; it does not invent itself, because it lacks the means. What has the means is therefore not nature. It is not matter, since this requires the specification and law builder. It is called Spirit, and it donates our own spirits, which are so free from the laws of reality, that they can create with phrases, even the people who use them: in imagination.

Divorced from laboratory testing, divorced from historical evidence, contrary to all evidence, without legal structure to illustrate, let alone demonstrate, this magical 'nature' has all the wisdom and knowledge and thought and law-making capacity which WE merely see it as having absorbed as an object of wise action, and it NEVER uses it when it is watched; but for Mr Gould's nature, it is by itself able to do it all. It must make itself from nothing, make order, make form, make laws, make machinery of code, develop it, change while still working, like running while having a heart transplant, then make minds, make spirits, leave no trace of having done so, show no capacity to do so either in action or in analysis of its powers, and DO IT QUICKLY.

Causes for this, must not only be invisible, but non-existent. Their existence and their evidence match to perfection, over all known time, not only in all known circumstances, in all known tests, but in experiments both noetic and empirical in the laboratory (cf. Repent or Perish 7, Excursion 2 cf. 1). Their powers are as absent in principle as in practice within the entire realm of nature. Just as the Bible has stated, the creation is finished. It does not go on. And so is this empirically testable statement verified, validated. What you logically need we have demonstrated; that it is not nature likewise. THIS, it merely verifies it.

*4

Cf. SMR pp.140ff., TMR Chs. 1, 4, 8.

*5 See for example, SMR Chs. 1, 3, 5 with verifications in 8-9, and confirmations in 10;

Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Ch. 3, and Swift Witness   6.

*6 See on this topic:

Aviary of Idolatry, Highway to hell; and

Tender Times for Timely Truth Ch.   8;
The Grating Grandeur ... Ch.   2; SMR  pp. 925ff.;
  

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

with News 98, News 37.

*7 See Highway of Holiness Ch. 4.