APPROACH TO BIBLICAL CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS

For convenience, this is broken into two chapters;
but it is in fact one whole. Ch. 4 completes it.

On this occasion, we are outlining some matters of approach in Biblical Christian Apologetics, each one of which is abundantly exhibited in the Site; but here the compilation focusses method only, as a perspective platform in this area, and arena.

When acting, you need meaning for your mentality. Without God, it is not there. If you declare this meaning void, you are perforce to be equipped with necessary meaningfulness in order to make such a statement, so that it is an antilogy. If you seek a viable basis, then you first need God for any meaning, since His objective knowledge alone is able to transcend ignorance, constraint and limit, and supply actuality; and you need validity for any logically allowable consequence to it. Truth does not grow on thistles, nor does it find its lair in thin air.

As to validity, see Ch. 10 and Ch. 11 below, as also Ch. 8 and Licence for Liberty Ch. 2.

As to procedure, first as in SMR Chs.1-3,5, 8-1 0, we prove that God is there, and then that He must have spoken. This is a process of following reason, the absence of which leads to inability to argue at all. While its omission is irrationality, and models denying or defying it need no other contradiction than their own self-contradiction, on the other hand, what includes reason as it is used continually, even in efforts to state why it is not valid! is so far rational. Its validation proceeds as we shall see. It is therefore a barrier to what denies it, annuls its objective significance or makes travesty of its powers, but a triumphant victor over what omits it.

We cannot, however, even on such a basis, read the mind of God for His plans; yet our created minds both can and should follow the work "of His fingers" of His deity in functional action, including action to find His word and face. To be sure, this would be impossible if He did not choose to disclose such things; but as His word shows, He has done it.

Next, from SMR Ch. 3, we present a short coverage of this aspect of our procedures in reasoning for the faith, as provided for in I Peter 3:15, for all who are interested in such a thrust. In any rational consideration, this will include all who ever argue against the Bible or Jesus Christ as the only begotten Son of God. In this excerpt, there is addition for our present purpose.

Thus reason is a necessity for thought and words (cf. SMR pp. 3ff.); and with it you proceed where our abilities show and the creation requires us to go; but without it, or with a system which does not provide objective truth and ground for its accurate and adequate conveyance to man, you deny the possibility of objective or absolutely true discourse, so removing irremediably your own theory, model or view from rational consideration. On the other hand, using logic, and so being rational, by this method as in SMR Chs. 1, 3, 5, 10, you find God's word, and hence the depiction of His mind, on which see also Barbs, Arrows and Balms 6 -7.

Reason, on finding the word of God, is validated, so that rationality joins hands with validity, all being enhanced by the find of the word of God, which then verifies and validates itself by its intrinsic and verifiable properties.

This of course is not what is called presuppositionalism, which requires that one start with God, or else confess that anything characterisable as truth be forgotten, including argumentation to abort it or capture it. Reactions are not actualities, but responses of one governed thing to another. That says you cannot get as knowable, a rational reality without starting with God

It is better to go much further. There is nothing else reason will suffer, as you proceed with it, in its own terms of validity, but God. This is no mere thrust to require a given beginning, but one to show there is no other end. It has a greater scope for procedure, and no less for possibility. It is not: Start here or end nowhere (which is true, but not entirely sufficient); but when you start with the very reason with which you argue, you ALSO find there is NOWHERE else valid reason CAN let you go. It is therefore a more exclusive schedule in terms of reason.

One could proceed: Further, you cannot logically abuse what is determinative, or there is no determination and hence your argumentation has all the substance of vacuity. What is itself baseless is base for nothing. If you are going to use reason, you cannot abuse it as a method. Once of course, you find by reason what, because of our construction and that of the world, it requires unless violated - that is the God of the Bible and the Bible of God: then you need to validate this. ONLY the Bible and the Lord are required by reason; but then, this done, we require reason to show its standing. This cannot be done except by two means. First, it must be consistent and coherent in itself, and correlate with consequences, showing itself empirically sufficient; and then the result of its finding must validate itself in its own performance criteria. It needs to cover things in height and depth as well as width.

To be sure, we cannot argue AT ALL, without using reason in its internal validity and empirical justification; but more also, we cannot argue against its use WITH IT. That is out from the beginning, while reason's own operational validity shows itself in its works and pellucid ways. THEN we show that this instrument, in its result at so great a level as showing and requiring God (for not without reason are we made with reason), is validated externally in this, that His Being and Revelation alike, the knowledge in Him, which results, and of Him, which is shown, and the impact of His declarations are as unvoidable as impactive, as consistent as secure, as beyond all other production means as indicative of His own.

This external validity added to the internal validity, the former in the result of reason in its identification procedure, through the result, the landing place for its constraints being found, identifiable and testable; and the latter in the internal conformity, coherence and power to perform, which last is an applied validity, leaves no other option. You abandon reason and so cease all argument about truth (including argument that absolute truth does not exist); or you receive its results. Reason demands God; God's existence, nay His word to mankind can be proved, is proved and is so presented here in this site.

His divine nature and power are indeed manifest, as Paul declares (Romans 1:17ff.). The only alternative is irrationality, which of course can prove nothing, and disprove the same amount, nor even be relevant to such thing. Ignore reason, and all cause and effect, characterisation and definition departs, as well as power to argue, for characteristics and criteria are themselves codes and nodes, which have results of which they are the occasion and cause, moving us with irrevocable reason on and back, to all levels, and at last to that of the institutive cause of these causes, and of temporal causality itself, where one must await the delimited dynamics, in their outcome, because they are there and operative (unless the Creator chooses to act in direct power in His creation, as empirically, beyond the laws of restriction, He does at His will).

What then ? Of course, this itself IS argumentation, so that you cannot ignore or outlaw or bypass reason; but it becomes in this qualified manner, a thrust of a kind apt and appropriate when conjoined with the other positive aspects of following reason and finding ultimate verification on arrival at the end of that quest. In reality, it is not that reason is defunct or unavailable, but subject to licence which must be validated from its basis when its job is done and this infinite eminence is reached, from its source, this confirmation and creator in this universe of man, from that eternity which in self-existence has made possible all that is delimited and defined, for which qualities it is the cause, as of all the others.

Creation is for Him not a mere invasion of possibility, but the institution of actuality for which we see the scope, and for which we admire the choice - not a choice among what is there, but FOR what is to be there, with its parameters as they are made to be, that it might have character, its beginning as wrought and its destiny as seems fit. In this is freedom for man but not autonomy; in this too is its befouling by human will and His redemption by HIS will; yet this without His either indulging its lapses or devouring its reality. Of this we shall see more, but it is fitting at this early stage to realise that functional place of reason in such dower and construction, so that according to our image-bearing function before the God of creation, it is able to mirror but not to engulf aspects of the very mind of God, who according makes its journey felicitous, and when He is found, its place both secure and efficacious in all realms.

What then of presuppositionalism ? If of limited application constructively, nevertheless, on the negative side, this (II) is a sound procedure, and is used here in harmony with I above; for that shows not merely that without God you are involved in antinomy, but that BY REASON you cannot fail to reach Him and His word. Thus these two are in obverse relationship, complementary and harmonious in the process.

In this method -I, procedure does not at all depend on this; but it uses it as part of the mutually confirmatory totality which is apparent on all sides, not merely one.

These testable aspects are myriad; the results are one. This is the SCIENTIFIC PHASE.

Further, in the whole gamut of philosophy, the Bible, as the word of God written, has to be able to stand in the face of any threat to its validity, knowledgeability, perception, perspicuity or power in practical promises. It has not merely done so, but as has been shown repeatedly (cf. SMR Chs. 3, 5, Wake Up World... Chs. 4-6), it leaves all contestants rather like Autumn leaves, slightly ridiculous at this level; except for this qualification, that it is perhaps more normal for it to leave them utterly nonsensical in their claims (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go!).

On the other side, this same Bible shows a capacity to give an all-encompassing perspective which explains all with nothing left over (cf. SMR Ch. 5), and beyond even that, as shown in The PQ, it even provides a solution with the ingredients both necessary for validity and unique in the same field, in such fields as predestination, freewill, responsibility and natural law. To this we turn in the next Chapter, near
its end.

Having successfully stated directly or otherwise what became, according to Professor Tom Barnes, Physics Head some time ago, at El Paso University of Texas, the three most important laws of science at the most fundamental level (cf. TMR Ch. 1), the Bible stands the maestro of science. It does not allow man to escape the work (and delight) of finding out more of His laws; but it sets the tone and gives the perspective from the outset.

THIS is the sort of achievement which one would EXPECT at the level of knowledge and majesty from the ACTUAL God, and it is there; and such is all and in every facet and department noted, a scientifically relevant VERIFICATION: indeed it constitutes a realm of verifications which multiplies in its constituents and components on every side. One has merely to look.

Indeed, SMR in no mean measure, includes an attestation of verifications in multiplied fields, of the accuracy of biblical perspective and depiction whether in archeology or psychology, sociology or in history, morals or disasters, revivification of the Jewish Israel, or the defence of Jerusalem; and other volumes continue these pursuits, and add to them. In moving into so many fields, we come to a new emphasis on method. Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ , Who Answers Riddles and Where He is, Darkness Departs, extends it further.

Sub-sets of this may be considered. These include the Historical Prognosis Phase, itself in close harmony with the Prophetic Prognosis aspect of the Scientific Verification Phase in Method. All these relate in turn, intimately, with the Exhibitive Resolution sub-set of the Exhaustive Resolution Phase. There is in all truth precisely what is both naturally and necessarily lacking in all the incoherence of monism, a distinguishability on the one hand, of elements, and a congregation in integrity on the other, so that nothing is missing, and ALL relates, and that closely. One aspect of this field is that very dismissive rebellion which shouts from the secular pulpits of much of academia - itself an aspect of liberty which can arise as we shall remind ourselves in the next Chapter, only because of love, or else that reciprocity to love which betokens an inclusive unity in the Source which is the Author and Creator and Redeemer, which also confirms the operability of liberty as noted in The PQ, the Predestination Quaternion and constitutes its ground of action. (This is now the Predestination Heptad.)

Whether however we consider the scientific, the qualitative, the quantitative, the prophetic or the resolving aspects, there is in this field an EXHAUSTIVE resolution which by being so categorically, constitutes one aspect of method for the apologetics of Biblical Christian theism.

Thus the very seasons illustrate the LIVING pulse of a power which having created, remains creative, just as does the mind of man which, having being created creative, creates: and how it creates, for good and for evil, whether marshalling thoughts or trains in the tumultuous megapolis, mechanical marvels or astute legal diction, musical exultancy or pathos, tender brilliance or appalling self-demonstration!

Creativity is a MUST FOR MAN, and he cannot stop; so that where good is too hard, evil is as vast as the oceans, which currently, as is fitting in intimate corollary with man's exalted place as made in the image of God, he pollutes almost to extinction, along with the atmosphere and the waters of the globe; just as he has long done in philosophy, now able to find a physical reminder and adequate venue for its folly. This it does as knowledge increases, as Daniel predicted for the long-range depiction of the world as its last days should come before devastation and judgment (Daniel 12). So does prediction and principle unite, and so do the tartans of truth continue their eloquence.

It all fits and it all runs like a team of greyhounds that know nothing but winning, getting to the lure; and with man it is not very different; for having forsaken God, he NATURALLY ruins nature, which God made, and his own in the process; and to add to the correlative deployment of it all, he does so very often in the grip of gods without meaning or evidence, which he erects in the very ebullience of his imagination, as if nothing but arrogance could suffice for what is made in the image of God. Yet, without His self-sufficiency, man looks rather ludicrous in the process, like a verbal bubble bag, which also is predicted as one massive ingredient of the last days before the Lord comes in person to deal with the sheep and the goats (II Peter 2:10,18, Matthew 25).

Indeed, one cannot help feeling like a doctor being shown by the patient every conceivable symptom of some intricate syndrome, classically signifying his disease, and having in all honesty to TELL him. In this case, fortunately, the remedy is at hand! Indeed, it is this which is in the very sub-title of the preceding work: The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy.

Everywhere and in everything, the caps fit on the bobbing heads, and man insists on wearing them, while using the blackened glasses of obscuration to frustrate realisation of his folly.

Folly runs, however fast one runs. Man is mastering speed, but not direction. This too is not only in line with the analysis of his condition in the Bible, but fulfilment of its specific prophecies, giving but one more illustration of the immense, intense intimacy of correlation of all the phases, as is fitting for truth.

Isaiah 30:15-16 puts it of ancient Israel, but God does not change, nor yet His principles (Psalm 102, Hebrews 1, Malachi 3): hence His words remain. These words as so often are applicable now to the Gentiles as to the Jews then (cf. Romans 1 and 11, and indeed to all who forsake the Lord and His word:

Not only are things RESOLVED which secular, humanist, irrationalist, or rationalistic philosophy seeks over millenia in vain to comprehend cohesively, but there is a certain facility in the process and procedure. You see this illustrated in SMR Ch. 5. It becomes furthermore intriguing and entrancing, like watching a careful construction of cards all collapse almost momentarily, into a heap, to find no resistance to the perspective which explains. There is nothing left; the issue is over. Only heat can proceed; the issue of light is long past.

Again, in the word and work of God, the more you burrow, the more ore you find; and what had been mere ground of swamps, becomes on a little drainage and investigation, the repository of a wealth of understanding so direct and dire to confusion, that it is like a Summer breeze in Winter, rose perfume in the desert and a fountain in the very midst of the aridities of thought, transforming all into a terrain of incalculable utility, beauty and productivity.

In turn, this allows you to see WHY philosophy failed, and WHERE! while at the same time delighting in finding HOW truth prevails and in what way! Indeed it is surpassing wonder to behold it all, coming into place, just as when a mathematical conundrum on being rightly viewed becomes so simple that one wonders how it ever became a problem at all! Ah! but that is the point, to see the elements as they are, and not as they are not!

If however there is an intimate and brilliant perspective which shows how failure became such and triumph is so, as to quality, there is also the sheer QUANTITY of the explication.

Here you find that the entire realms of morality, aesthetics, liberty, program and determinism, love, reason's integrity and so forth, are resolved like so many mice caught in a bevy of traps. Before they ran wild in the house, a menace to health and tripping on all sides; now they are departed, not being desired.

We can go into any level in this way, rightly based. Thus you not only find it relatively easy to define what BEAUTY IS, but what is its MEANING. In other words, there is even scope for what may be a new subject, the Metaphysics of Aesthetics! Everything yields not merely as if painfully to a victor, but far more readily to the perspicuity of the word of God: it does so even artistically, as a view yields its INTRINSIC WONDER to the investigatory eye! You find what is THERE! This aspect is found in Ancient Words ... Ch. 7 for example. Again, metaphysics revels in SMR Ch. 3, as validity in SMR Ch. 5 and TMR Ch. 5, while monism writhes in Repent or Perish Ch. 7, which unleashes the vision of truth, rather as one releases a beautiful setter, long held in captivity! Liberty finds itself a delight, as we see in The PQ and in Licence for Liberty and such things we shall consider a little further on.

Like lightning, the light flashes everywhere you turn, when you first turn to the God who made you, and then to the recognition and realisation of what He desires, the way He works and how He is to be found. This leads on to the personal aspect.

Since millions do this, many in the most conspicuous fashion, from Moses to Elijah, from David to the very day of that Christ who Himself as predicted, embodied deity but used it towards the heavenly realm from which He came while in the format of mankind: it is not difficult to test. The many works of Corrie ten Boom are a good illustration of this as is that delicious little work of the wife of Chinese missionary, Jonathan Goforth, namely Rosalind, who gives staggering and eminently practical expression of this fact in How I Know God Answers Prayer! The works of the great Orphanage promoter and exponent, George Mueller are similar, detailed, practical, constant, as promises made declare themselves the same met.

It is when not comfort or convenience, not 'success' in carnal terms but service and spirituality are goals, and the love of God constrains that answers to prayer become as natural as breathing: not the hot breath of lusty desire, but the organised breathing of the one who runs a race ... wisely! (cf. II Timothy 2:4ff.).

It is virtually normal in this Age, for people to seek to use Christianity for their comfort or pleasure, rather than to be used for the glory of God; but this, though predicted (II Timothy 3), is merely irrelevant to the point here in view. We are looking at what is, at what is spiritual and godly and hence effective and realisable.

The misuse and abuse of Christianity and Christians, now vast is ramifications in many lands, THIS too is promised (John 16:2, Matthew 10:18ff., John 14:30, 7:7, 15:20 cf. Revelation 12:10-17); but the power and presence of God is the point (Luke 21:15), and when you love Him, this suffices. His peace overflows when you walk in His way, and His wisdom is on hand for HIS purposes in the same realm (as promised in James 1). In this, it all works, and faith thus leads to faith, while pious fraud leads predictedly, to leanness and darkness (cf. Isaiah 1, 57-58, Malachi 2-4). These things are illustrated daily.

It is one thing to behold EXAMPLES of faith at work and promises paid up from the Lord; it is another to find life itself exemplary of such spiritual quality, such divine comradeship and such empowering equipment that it becomes rather at times like some pounding waterfall which breaking on the rocks below, thus bringing such a flourish of spray and the rainbows of mercy that it is not even comparable to living without such exultant melodies of delight, replacing the maladies of confusion or corruption.

At the personal level, we follow the scripture to Christ as a vast focus of many prophecies.

In this we find not only spectacular confirmation at every level of archeology and history, logic and law, but in this, that no one of the almost innumerable features He had to fulfil as identification and exhibit of God on earth as man (an infinitely difficult task in principle, when the God is infinite), has ever been shown false. When one adds the circumstance that the nation of Israel which killed Him (via Pilate), was that Israel in which He stirred the Jewish traditional nest to the uttermost, Himself showing invulnerability in knowledge or logic to all attacks which were of course only a prelude to death if they failed (there then being no other way for removal of the 'threat' of truth), so that motivation to discredit was maximal, we find what science relishes and reason approves.

His triumphs were of course, then, fatal; but this fatality was temporary only; and it was designed to demonstrate power over death, as proclaimed and placarded in the prophets for centuries before, even the date for it being specifically set (and of course fulfilled - see Highway of Holiness Ch. 4). The triumphs were foretold, the cost too, the treatment, the murder, the means of it, the date of it, the sublime self-sacrificial marvel of it, its effectuality, and the wonder was to be seen to be experienced as a new type of perfection in this dying orb (cf. Isaiah 42, 49-55); the Gospel with it was likewise foretold, its initial rejection by Israel and its advance into the globe. Its total planning was revealed centuries in advance, but still it could not be stopped this plan.

Though the nations ebb and flow in relationship to it, yet its demands and its offer do not alter. Indeed, the EFFORT to alter them, so abundant as a pollution today, was also foretold (II Timothy 3-4, I Timothy 4, II Peter 2 leading to Revelation 13, 17). But on earth, Christ had to PERFORM not only in practice in terms of principle, but in person in terms of agony. Part of this is epitomised in the travail in Gethsemane (Luke 22:39ff.), and discernible in harassment (cf. Luke 11:53-54). But the efforts failing as seen so clearly in Matthew 22:23-46), death, that predicted, followed.

Thus even His mortal enemies could not show ANY inconsistency with prophecy or morality or power or healing thrust, and when His works were so numerous, the challenges so frequent, the power required so divine (cf. Mark 2, John 11), His words often preceding His actions, making them a point to point test: then this becomes a vast mountain of testimony.

Not only was there for Jesus Christ a veritable cauldron of potential for being 'burnt', but the facts in contrast to this liability, never even fail to nourish when they are investigated. Surpassing vigour, supernal rigour and total triumph are the continual and unvarying testimony which in turn was the warrant for death in those contending; since that was one avenue available! One fainting, failure, divergence between claim and consequence, and His death would have been unncessary, His fraudulence the result, just as His triumphs, not in bald panache but in confrontational power mingled with both authority and humility, rendered unbelief indefensible (cf. John 5:31-47, 14:11).

Similarly, to the smallest detail, nothing is able to be shown wrong in millenia of intensive hatred and research alike; and the scope is like the great valleys, the height of requirements like the mighty summits in the huge ranges. Thus the scripture is logically required, evidentially confirmed, in terms of its major focus, a fortiori re-confirmed, in the scope of vulnerability, uniquely maximal, in the field of rebuttal, uniquely inviolate.

See SMR Ch. 6, Christ the Wisdom and the Power of God Ch. 8, Repent or Perish Ch. 2 for example. See also SMR Appendix C, Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch. 2.

Thus the personal experience of God, and the Person who as God by prediction and detailed prophecy came to earth and by power did what was required to make a testimony unequalable in principle and invulnerable in practice: these meet in an intimacy of correlation which is its own field.

Turning now from the personal, and in particular the historical testimony of the Christ,

we come to the criteria of the demonstrable word of God, the Bible, the sole authorised word from Him to mankind.

This matches and correlates with VIII above, but has the beauty of being His own diction, not the living of life on the part of an imperfect being, such as each of us is. As such it has its own intense and intensive contribution to method.

This refers to the way in which one scripture presents a similar impact to another, yet with all the reality of individuality, even though each comes from a different writer in a different period of history, or even culture. There is a certain intimacy of correlation, precisely as one would expect of a single author of incisive purpose and unitary mode! Answers to Questions Ch. 9, Light of Dawn ... 1; Pall of Smoke, Diamond of Joy Ch. 11 give numerous illustrations, and these may come in the form of verbal parallel, phrased ricochets, resumed expansions of concepts or prefigurings, as if a century merely was a pause before the 'lecturer' resumed, providing historical illustrations of principles or depiction of principles applicable to cases. Thus, for example, foci on Christ that arise so frequently, may repeatedly be adumbrated by foreshadowings, with different degrees of directness (cf. Highway of Holiness Ch. 10). It is like a family, each member accustomed to the other, all in one purpose with one language and one insight into what is denied to all others!

Let us however resume now our more general dissertation on the majesty of the utterance, reflected in myriadfold manners in the writings.

Naturally, at this point, we are merely considering the phases in TYPE, in the field of method. In this, both at the personal level and in the written one, there is just that supernal marvel which excites delight and stirs worship, being objectively beyond all that might be expected, but yet, on reflection, in the very level to which one might in general terms, have looked. What is found in the ricocheting verbal modes, is likewise seen in the connotational and principial exhibits.

Thus meaning comes into harmony with assertion, not contrariety, knowledge has its basis, truth its origin for man, order its genesis, brilliance of originality in the universe as in the mind of man, its security of causative conception, freedom its fabric; and the varied orders and liberties observable in man, and ready for realisation logically (cf. The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy), these gain their validity of source just as this matches their insistence in application. There is no need to seek to make one particle, one sort of personality, one dynamic, such as an elimination concept for an 'explanation' of an arrival requirement for all the brilliance and diversity of life. All things lie bare in this light, and more you look in any corner, the more both simplicity and abundance of coverage are found. This is one of the characteristics of truth, both scientific and other, in its various fields. It does not have to be pushed and pulled: it asserts itself.

In this respect, to use analogy, it is like a case in tennis, when you not only see the amazing score line, in verification of truth, reality, but witness the shots, their classic proportions, abundant brilliance and intelligent design, evocative of more than admiration, for here is a Champion indeed, come as man but so far surpassing him as to constitute the very standard and inspiration both!

Now that we have seen some headings and outlines, let us luxuriate a little. First, some might like to survey in a slightly more specialised way, some aspects of validity and reason, and for this an Appendix is provided. However, it is good to proceed in the precise vein above for pleasantness, so let us now do so.

Thus we see that Reason for the Faith, as provided for in I Peter 3:15, with its earthly setting shown in Romans 1:17ff., as also the result of its disregard, can be phrased and phased into a

This in turn is self-confirmatory on every side, as in science ideally various hypotheses are sought to be intertwining, each approbative and sometimes even illustrative of the other.

In general perspective, if you pre-suppose no God, because it suits you, then you find no rationality or validity^*1. Presuppositionalism specialises in this fact.

However it is not our path merely to do this, grievous as it is to all unbelief at the outset. This is merely one phase.

In our next step, instead of adding to the presuppositional track, beyond the first aspect, to the point of disestablishing views or models which omit truth only to tell us what it is, which is not in itself presuppositionalism, we proceed to follow reason, which after all for anyone seeing man in the image of God has no problems, rationalism being merely a debasement of this facility into an idol.

If then you set out to follow reason in order to inspect results, while also affirming any model which destroys its own validity, then you find antinomy, its voidance and deletion of argument, meaning and even words. If reason were an oddity of correlation merely, then it would be in a self-contained system of thought which would breed nothing of truth, merely of happenstance.

Thus again if causality were denied, then even the meaning of words would become insupportable, since characteristics are necessary for definition, and these in turn have their innate grounds and nature, which instead of being erratic, in order to become describable, are affirmable so that a source of results is correlative to a possibility of definition. Remove the one and you remove the other, so leaving yourself speechless, and hence unfit for argumentation. See Causes.

Character must BE in order that DEFINITION might be! Character must have ground, and does, in order that it might become characterisable. The process is a causative one, in which what is produces what appears, through sufficient ground. Science being built on this, finds its matrix in it, and hence its power. A realm of causality caused by some imaginary cause, does not thereby become void; for on the contrary, IN ORDER to imagine a cause for causality, you have to ASSUME IT OPERATIONAL FIRST, so that something or other may CAUSE IT. The concept of such a thing is thus merely illusory and self-contradictory. It is just one more antinomy.

The mere fact that you are imagining a cause for causation does not alter the fact that you are using it in order to derive it, which has the common name in logic, of begging the question. This is an entirely vain thing, suitable only for school-masters who seek to teach the elements of logic to fledgings in Year 11 High School.

If however you avoid the voidance of reason and of causality, then no longer are you barred and harried, harassed and impotent at the outset by compulsory, pervasive irrationalism (cf. SMR Ch. 5). If you FOUND yourself on irrationalism, you cannot escape its quality, merely immersing yourself in the magic of its cessation in order to proceed.

If then, acting with this in view, you follow reason as shown in SMR Ch. 1 for example, you are forced to find God. This it does, even moving to His only authorised word to mankind, the Bible, by irrevocable necessity (cf. The Meaning of Liberty and the Message of Remedy). This Bible in turn confronts you on inescapable terms with the Christ of God, the remedy of God, and the Gospel of grace, of which it is full (cf. SMR Ch. 7, and pp. 520ff.). This becomes then an entire solution to seeking, involving metaphysical, epistemological, aesthetic, moral, political and physical resolution of mutual and specific principles (cf. SMR Ch. 4, Question and Answer 7, Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Ch. 7, Little Things Ch. 5, It Bubbles... Ch. 9, Repent or Perish Chs. 7, 2).

It resolves antinomies, excludes antilogies, and institutes not only individual meaning, but a nexus of meaning, coherent and integrated, while dependent and created. This relates intimately to the biblical point of man made in the image of God (that is, with capacity for some form of mutual knowability), in this, that it has both practical and theoretical resultants.

MEANING tends to avoid muddle if it is CORRECT, and its absence tends to create it, because directional being like man, if lost, can readily do immense harm to themselves, to one another, and to their setting, as if of course routinely if not ruthlessly occurring with ever increasing tempo, as man gains more knowledge and hence scope for power. This breeds not only external pollution but internal as well, man becoming susceptible as psychiatric ways soar, to secondary problems when meaning is lost in the middole of psychic muddle. Just as antinomies in logic are removed in so following reason to God and to His word, so antipathies likewise have their source of resolution in understanding and the necessary divine power and perspective granted in the r remedial provision that the Bible has exhibited, and Christ applied.

These features as is typical in the biblical framework in particular, and in truth in general, are confirmatory by their mutual and dispersive spread of solutions to manifold problems and constitute therefore one of the innumerable spread of attestations, one of the luxuries of following the truth.

This result is then subjectible methodologically (though it is already sure) to scientific method and is left alone with the criteria it requires, so validating reason, as is normal practice in other spheres. There being no competition in religious fields in this specific level, there are no issues; but the different heights and depths of verification when there, constitute an integral and personal answer; and since we are personal, this is necessary as one aspect. We thus move from the logical to the psychological, the social, the military, the political, the diplomatic, the empirical and the notional, all tied reactively together, like the limbs of bison, stout and mutually supportive and meaningful for the whole.

Simplicity and integrity of all fields and powers of man, in resultant is its own additive to verification and integrity, and in fact, this could be looked on as aspect XIII in method, since it not only, as in VII above is a quantitative corollary to truth, but a systematic one in depth as well, a methodological surplus.

It is a matter of total structure in architectural simplicity, and its wings not only meeting logical need, but surpassing it in just that way that the mind of the Author of man in His own image might be expected to do. It has the savour of regality and the originality of the unlimited, with the cohesion of coherent thought and the superb correlations of design at the metaphysical level, as in the more apparent meeting places of thought's envisagement that are correlative to power without limit and understanding that is majestic. To look and learn is privilege and wonder both! It is, in fact, so both in this way, and in the physical mutuality and correlative capacities of parts of the body, right down to the level of billions of inter-related cells as in the brain, with trillions of connection operative with one result, which has its own status, stature and susceptibility to dynamic and dispersal.

Since the Bible, verified and validated as from God, is both a revealing of His plans, personal nature and purposes, and of His actions towards man and his environment, it opens a new test, that is likewise an opportunity. Truth loves and rushes to its exhibition, for that is one of the most conspicuous aspects of light: it reveals by nature!

Thus, through these inscripturated words, the Bible, validated as authentic in every way and wise, the Creator provides a way for a stable platform of communication with God, in the plan of salvation. More, these same words provide personal access to God as by children to a father, and even, in Christ authenticated therein as Saviour for mankind (Titus 2-3), it provides reasonable grounds for such access (cf. SMR pp. 582ff, 611ff., 620ff.). It provides personal supervision to ensure adequacy and fidelity of the communication, and grounds for this being not only possible, but actual in a coherence of concept brilliant in disposition, all-encompassing in provision, like a prodigy of mountain peaks, each an independent summit, all a glorious totality, beyond need, superb in configuration and elevation.

In this way, the necessity of absolute truth revealing itself willingly is met, and at the same time, a rationally affirmed procedure is in place. It is not as if reason creates, but that in its fossicking and ascertaining office, it LOCATES the word of God! Further, in His making available such a thing as becoming the children of this God of creation, there is from this same word provided a change of nature. It is able to be transformed by the same divine power that made it free enough to deform itself, from the dashed image of God in sinful man, to heights desired, available and beckoning. Thus freedom has meaning to its very depths, and one's nature is not one's ultimate at all, but God who calls, oneself merely a phase for consideration where God provides a way beyond oneself! So does liberty become meaningful; and in love, which is willing to do such work on man, there is the basis of the change for it is costly to redeem, restore and re-make.

This means of access provides for the negation of the offer (cf. John 3:19, Matthew 23:37ff.), which makes it meaningful in terms of liberty. If indeed, sin precludes the healthy operation of will, yet God in love is able to know and find His own, having desired all, while willing to violate none (cf. Luke 19:42ff., John 1:12ff.). In the end, as for creation, so for re-creation or regeneration as it is called (cf. Colossians 3:10, Titus 3:5ff.), God is author of initiative; but having founded man in His image, He is also with authority, the exponent of a love which never defiles itself by becoming force. Hence the endless seeming parade of paternal laments in the scriptures. You see this for example in as in Isaiah 48:16, and Jeremiah 48:36 -

It is the LORD who is speaking as announced in 48:35. Poignant likewise and expressive of love in its integrity is the Isaiah passage:

There incidentally, in 48:16 you see the sending of the Saviour from the Godhead as in the book of Isaiah, God the Father sending God the Son here prefigured with that majestic ease that relates to absolute truth speaking beyond time, and into it, so that we may listen! This example, while confirming our present purpose, also and in turn finds its place in XII as exhibiting the phenomenon of resonance. Facility without being facile, multiplicity of truth without strenuousness: here are some of the criteria of that majesty for whom truth is more than environment. It is His own nature!

Thus we are considering the divine provision in the Bible, the word of God validated and verified, so that this not only gives scope for liberty as noted above, in order to allow people to NEGATE (John 3:19), but provides personal VERIFICATION of the reality of what is freely supplied in practice to believers: and that in the special case of PERSONAL inter-relationship with this God, which as in knowing the artist and not merely surveying his works, is of the most intense and intrinsic gain. Just as millenia have shown the way in word and in the various phases approaching the ultimate, so many have found the way in those millenia, and illustrated some of its features and foci. It can be costly, as for example, Foxe's Book of Martyrs makes clear enough! It works as described in the word of God, and this working is part of the labour of God, to apply what He has provided, freely, but to His own cost.

It is an integral reality and a valid integrality, not in terms of parts as gods, an office they writhe to avoid despite the most invasive experiments over long years (cf. TMR Ch. 1), but as a created system inter-active indeed, yet a derivative of design, each agent and aspect having place not by it own power, but by imaginative construction, deft correlation and constrained operability, functionality. One such part is man; all of whose personal aspects are explained in the ways we have begun to exhibit under XIII, and have often exhibited before

Meanwhile, let us perceive that it is for this reason, again in verification, that you find one such as Paul the apostle saying this:

Thus at the level of test (not that faith needs this, but method supplies it!), there is verification scope at the personal and inter-personal level with no less a personal being than the infinite God; and it is not in terms of His promises and principles, which merge like mountains on the horizon, the way and the result being correlative in intimacy.

These aspects include that chastening as required from any father (Hebrews 12), but the more especially from the Father of spirits; and this is present also: for it is not pleasure but company in the beauty of holiness which is at issue, and no more can the child of God fiddle about than can the scientist fool with his records or the athlete with his training. The fact that the end result is guaranteed (John 5:24), when it is LIFE which is operative, is no more relevant than is the knowledge that if one follows a path one will not get lost. It is not a question of motive but merely the characteristic of a highway, in fact the highway of holiness described as such in Isaiah 35.

This provides greater richness and depth of test, for love is as far removed from pleasure as is gluttony from appetite.

Now this liberty for man, however corrupted and polluted, implies and denotes, and indeed this the more from the pollution, a spiritual evil and disease in man without God, by which freedom, in excess of pathological zeal, frequently elevates man to god. It is not so actually, but in spirit; and often is this found in practice but without the power or the wisdom! It is indeed to pseudo-god-like status that he elevates himself, if you desire it expressed more fully. Thus is created collision, confusion and vast evil. This in turn expressly as well as logically by implication, is prelude to a rebellion which has results in every phase of human life.

This is an application of the onset, of the scope of liberty despite love, in the realm of creation.

One result of the rebellion is mental, so that men invents countless philosophies, none of which endures, any more than fashion does (cf. I Corinthians 7:31, Romans 1:17ff., I John 2:16, II Chronicles 36, II Kings 17, Matthew 23:37ff., Luke 19:42ff.), so accentuating and aggravating man's rebellion. These are predictable, since man has mind and warped spirit; and it is predictably invalid, as succeeding generations continually attest of the failed mental flights of predecessors without the governance of God in their thinking (cf. SMR Ch. 3, News 82, Repent or Perish Ch. 7, with Spiritual Refreshings 13 and 16).

Thus these mental paradigms of pollution called philosophy, be it moral or political, metaphysical or epistemological, logical or other, when secular and without God as is usual, often lead to imaginary gods to enshrine their ambits (cf. Deuteronomy 32:17ff.), which can arise in detached hearts and so create the confusion which, to overview it in biblical terms, merely confirms the pollution.

The results are inoperable logically, and readily become dire politically, as being seen the more in recent times with the militant Moslem phenomenon, abundantly provided for in much of its excesses in the Koran (cf. More Marvels... Ch. 4, Divine Agenda ... Ch. 6), as in the predictions of Christ (Matthew 24:24, John 16:2); and indeed, it is precisely the folly of ignoring the invisible (cf. It Bubbles ... Ch. 9), and Him who rules all, both visible and invisible, which has led so such visible results in our philosophically debauched generation (cf. TMR Ch. 8, News 121, 122). If you ignore basics, then your ignorance will lead to what become for you increasingly, insoluble puzzles and ultimate vulnerabilities. This world has become a specialist in these, even given in some lands, the wealth and time to fossick and foster, focus and incite, wars breaking out like boils in a spoiled system.

Blindness that is wilful always has this result that is woeful, whether mentally or morally with its aids in Aids, or politically as with aides-de-decamp in Hitler and Stalin, Mao and Lenin.

It does not work, for man simply is not so made; you can FORCE it for a while, and when as biblically predicted, such a method is used by a world power based in Europe (cf. Cascade ... Ch. 12, News 151, With Heart ... Ch. 10, His Wounds ... Ch. 3), it may last as did Hitler for a little while. Then it may seem that this power of pollution is ultimate; but it is merely an asininity of the highest order, and its overthrow temporarily by man or finally by God, by reality at last, is as assured ... as is its coming. As to that, it is soon (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5), in terms of the biblical criteria.

Already the world has had two millenia to experience the power of God and the fulfilment of the Messianic thrust to the uttermost in Jesus Christ; God is not impatient, but utterly sure (cf. II Peter 3:9). It will come. The fulfilment of the next phase of Christ's redemption and rule, namely the rule, is invested in His word, with a place; and it will meet this race as did the rest of His declarations.

The increasing numerical power of Europe, the rise of its currency relative to the US dollar in stark contrast, its increasing concern about its Constitution, its divorce from real ideals in this, in favour of pragmatic devices (cf. Christ, the Cumulative and the Culmination Ch. 4) has been apparent for long. The current realisation of over-spending by some parts of it, seems set to bring much of Europe into something like a unified whole, as foretold of a group of such nations. These features are in line with the predictions, as this growing Euro-cluster is faithfully following the follies of dead philosophies, which become morbid mortuaries for the deceased in the long run. One inducement is simple: it is that truth hurts, challenging unrighteousness; and its avoidance assures collision, as throughout human history.

Thus the liberty in the concave of unbelief leads to erratic philosophy, conformable politics, oppression and antagonism between false religions and false versions of religion, all using force here or there; and these mutually antagonistic power blocs both obstruct and conflict (cf. Luke 11:52), oddments continually re-emerging as if a kaleidoscope of very certain parts has been well shaken.

This rapacious and disintegrative process has accelerated since in particular, the German invasion of France in 1870, in the Franco-Prussian war, through 1914-18, 1939-45 World Wars, extending into the 1945-1990 cold War with its partition problem for Europe, and now with an increasingly directive status amid mounting murders and slaughters (as in the orders of the Madrid Quartet - towards Israel of all places!), is rampaging into Middle East. With multiplied furies, with its machinations, invasions, threats of annihilation and the like, bonded with rockets sent with hate, it spews spurious religion to justify murder, mini-mayhem and in mind, vast genocide .Even children are wildly subject to indoctrination, lest they should think. All these features of development confirm the mass of mess which folly invents and obstinacy consummates, so accounting on the negative side, for no small measure of modern European history.

Where the godless Nietzsche has wanted or worked even to attack God (though God lives and Nietzsche perforce is departed), which led to the martial torment of many of His subjects, the atheist Marx to assail the personality (BY personality), the beguiled Freud to belittle the mind (BY the mind) and Darwin, equally reductionistic, to mythicise life in a voiding of causative realities, there has been that triple war on truth which resulted in the captivity of many. These and allied blunders have left the impact of a contrary reality increasing fatal for man^*2,
*3. The attack on life is itself not without cause, since Darwin's delusive models liberate man from his Maker, morals from their mentor and life from its humble beginnings, at the hand of the programmatic maestro whose works are spelled out word by word, in the DNA's vast and integrated directives). But man increasingly, as a drunkard, will not listen.

SO the actions breed reactions, the follies of the mind the frenzies of the body, the idols of the heart the wastage of millions of hearts, in a desolatory action which makes man the potential marvel, the marred wastage unit. If much remains, even that is threatened by atomic bombs and atomised hearts.

Episodes of desolation have led to an era of mutual co-operation and even co-ordination. Power, unity and religious vagueness with vagaries of 'destiny', this is the documented situation now facing us in Europe (Christ the Cumulative ... Ch. 4), an ideal preparation for the power to come and its devastating destruction in its day. Europe is a pivot to be; but it is its coming incumbent who is crucial (cf. Highway of Holiness Ch. 2, SMR pp. 683ff., His Wounds... Ch. 4, *5, Let God be God Ch. 8, Biblical Blessings Ch. 2, SMR pp. 904ff., 886ff.).

More generally, racial hatred, survival of the fittest as a new political game, through pride as in World War I cardinally, through aspiration as in World War II, through the heat of ideological desire on the part of a defunct system parasitic on others, in the Cold War, the resurgence of money for oil with Islamic triumphalism, as was present not a little from the capture of Mecca on, with Muhammad (he was not ASKED to rule them by all! but invaded with power and passion), the exploitation of moral barbarism in the name of religious immunity, the pragmatic KGB-style utilisation of resources as they may be found, with results as they may occur: this and that, these and those, and many more such framed philosophic putsches have polluted the air of this earth till it becomes more and more difficult to breathe at all.

This is metaphorical, but it even has literal application for some! Sour power becomes glower power which brings nearer that hell which life without God comprises.

This development and direction of flow of course is specifically predicted in overview in Matthew 24, Luke 21 (cf. Matthew 24:7-8,12,21-22), but it is the DIRECTION of flow which is our current interest, and its predictability on the biblical basis to which we are attending!

This differs from V above, in that that was an episodic matter, whilst this is a systematic one; and it differs from other aspects in this, that it belongs to the application of biblical data to the world in two concordant phases. It differs from the qualitative and quantitative aspects in that it is inter-systematic. Indeed, it is the very plethora of considerations and the intrinsic-extrinsic relationships between them which is like a texture or fabric, and is the very testimony of the substantial and underlying reality which one would expect. This, in turn, is verification of the biblical perspective all over again, at this precise level as well as in correlative other ones. Indeed, it is doubtful if there is any limit to such phases; and it is here merely a selection which is made for the purpose of showing method, and marvel simultaneously; but then again, when you know God, while it is no less marvellous to SEE such things, it is far less surprising.

Champions serve aces, may not be universally true in the tennis world, but it is near it. Deity deals in depths and heights that reveal themselves from infinitude without cease to the finite mind: this for one in the image of God, is not merely unsurprising, but in accord with expectation!

These and many such features seen frequently on this site, then, not only further verification, something that is quite pervasive, but fulfil specific biblical analysis and prediction, as does a vast area of the scope, sequence and underlying content of modern history, not least with

2) the Jewish presence once again in Israel. This is found together with the inveterate detestation of the same as seen both in the UN's invidious and destabilising negativity (cf. His Time is Near Ch. 10), and in the camp of the false prophets, such as the Muhammad fanatical camp of fundamentalistic militants.

Zechariah 12 forecast just such pre-occupation with 'dealing' with Jerusalem (cf. SMR Appendix A, It Bubbles ... Ch. 10), and just such cost for the presumption! Ezekiel predicted just such restoration into the very wantonry of the nations (as did Moses in Leviticus 26 with Deuteronomy 32), for an Israel restored to its national place. This however, it is most clearly and emphatically depicted in the Bible, in God's faithfulness because of His desire and word, not because of their honour or their faithfulness (cf. Ezekiel 36:22, cf. 37:28, 39:27); and if it to one, then it is to all that the message will reach and who come to Him (John 5:. When the mind of God is expressly set on a target, it is not man who alters it (Ephesians 1:11).

It is thus a divine vigour which is being enacted, and the issue is not in the end what who will 'do' to or 'for' Israel, but the mind of God. This being written and propositional in scripture, the waves of horror killing become mere flagrancies of human obstinacy, which like all other, have dim and dismal future awaiting them (Ezekiel 38-39, Joel 3, Habakkuk 3, Micah 7,).

Moreover, it is not only the Jewish presence in Israel (cf. SMR Ch. 9, Appendix A), but in Jerusalem which Zechariah and Christ (Luke 21:24) connote; it was to be a return after many days before they reach their Messiah, first rejected (Zech. 12:10) at last. Many indeed were these to be, in its exile (cf. Leviticus 26:37-42, Deuteronomy 32:35-42, Hosea 3:1-5). For how long has the curse, not causeless, come (cf. Deuteronomy 32:22-29, Proverbs 26:2)!

Now after so long a time, after 1900 years it has come. Indeed, it is the Jewish re-take of Jerusalem which is, as seen there in Luke 21:24, the signal extraordinary, of the near return of Christ. THIS HAD TO HAPPEN FIRST; so here we find not only the general character of modern history, the return of the Jews, and indeed their glorious triumphs as forecast by that same Zechariah (loc. cit., cf. SMR Ch. 9), but the Jerusalem re-capture (1948, first 'half', 1967 the rest). This serves as a specific index to fit with the rest of the historic tartan of colours and strands predicted; and both compose together the signal of coming culmination.

It is here shown definitively that the river is near the mouth to the sea... It is sea-side time, but alas, not in any holiday sense! The signal here notable is one occurring once in nearly two millenia. It is not a repetitive phenomenon in the Christian era, but a single and singular one, hotly disputed, burningly denounced, but divinely ensured. Jerusalem is Jewish again.

Thus explained in spiritual pollution, and predicted in divine power, both, is this world's disrelish of this Jewish fact in Jerusalem, and the UN's inveterate hostility to a Jewish national presence there. The nations have been thus and were predicted to be thus, to the end (cf. Psalm 2). WHY do the nations rage ? It is against the LORD and against His Christ, says the Psalm; but the end is clear, as that Psalm shows. It is a hostility which not only led to the crucifixion of Christ, but leads on to the very rebuke of God among the nations, which was to come and now approaches with all the energetic throb of a distant express train, ever now more clearly heard on the echoing rails.

Pragmatically as well as principially, no Physics text book is as sure as the Bible; it never errs. Physics - for all its to-do, is a study with which modern man loves in his own inveterate declension from God and desire to 'handle' the universe as if it were is own construction, whereas he cannot even construct himself - is a discipline which varies its theories to meet ever-challenging facts. The Bible, by contrast, in over three millenia, controls facts, and hence has no need empirically, just as there is no scope spiritually, to change! (cf. Matthew 23:35, Isaiah 55). That of course, and this is further verification because it is a TESTABLE matter, was just what Christ said. Not a jot or tittle will pass till what ? It is till ALL is fulfilled. Hence ONE error and He is wrong. That is a standard no other branch of knowledge can or does meet.

THAT in turn is further verification: it would be unreasonable to impose such a requirement of man; it would be unreasonable NOT to do so with God when He so speaks, a fact which Christ indicates clearly enough in Matthew 5:17-20 in His famous jot and tittle statement, as in 24:35 in His God beyond the universe declaration!

Rebellion, biblically posited of man, does not relish reality discordant with its hopes and dreams. Adolescent dreams are by NO means the only ones! (Jeremiah 23:25!). Thus this return of the Jews both confirms long-range prophecy over millenia (from Moses in Deuteronomy 32, Leviticus 26), something far more notable than successfully targeting a small moon from billions of miles away, and rebukes illicit hopes and puerile dreams lingeringly attached to errant manhood!

Since man is so potently destructive by INTENTION, and frequently in sad and even grievous actuality, and since he is so variable and creative in thought and deed, this scramble of human thrust against divine diction, in this eventual Jewish outcome patently connotes that this Age is nearly over. Therefore and quite predictably - indeed predictedly as in Psalm 2 and Deuteronomy 32 with Zechariah 12 - this antagonises the rebels against God, even those who see the writing on the wall, and can read.

This fact in turn arouses both fear and further hatred, as is normal in rebellion when authority is undented; and redoubled efforts to quash that Jewish State arise not only from Palestinian murder squads, Islamically financed assassins of children, whose punishment by Israel the Press rarely ceases to focus. It comes also from the UN, and from the Madrid Quartet of the UN, EU, US and Russia. To be sure that name for the unholy alliance it denotes is now rather anachronistic; but the intention is not! This group with its Road Map have a road to further removal by international power of more of what the Jews gained despite international armies, at the first in 1948.

These things jointly show not only a pervasive coverage of giant movements in history over vast ages, from the word of God written, the Bible, but a majestic splendour in scope, detail and accuracy, atmosphere, perspective and detail. This provides the MAJESTIC PERSPECTIVE, a major face of Biblical Christian Apologetics (No. XI above). We see in the predicting word of God the atmosphere of sustained shame for the Jew, shameless intervention by the Gentile, passion aroused and military victory against all 'odds' by the Jew by virtue of divine action, the seizing of Jerusalem and its embroiling in intervening busybodies who cannot leave alone what God has ordained. We see the case of one of Israel like a thousand as Zech. 12 declared would occur before they repented of the murder of the Christ (12:10), which follows. It is all there, in its zeal, its passions, it sequence and its style.

It is so like looking down on mountains from peaks, that the comparison is strangely arresting. It is the Lord who looks down on man in his place and sees him as he is (Isaiah 40:21ff.), and His word majestically attests this fact, just as it graciously directs man to the divine remedy (Isaiah 40:9-10, 52:7-55:6).

Nor is the scientific verification at all levels testable (and as on mountains that one is climbing, there are MANY faces to survey and surmount), by any means, all! Problems insoluble without God, the revealed and known God, not some flummery of mere invention or calumny of idle contention, are resolved by the specifically biblical data about Him, His purpose and plans, and concerning man. Not merely is this without residue (the Exhaustive Resolution phase of Biblical Christian Apologetics), but it is with facility (another, more specialised aspect of the Majestic Perspective aspect of the method).

This applies to the fields of the meaning and nature of beauty, freedom, morals, responsibility, guilt, law and love, folly and arbitrariness, good and evil, meaning and 'Nature', and many others that arise on this site and in the mind of man, and have done so for millenia; and some of these are given condensed reference in

Problems man proposes, God disposes by revealing the reality in terms of which alone they are resolvable. Their resolution is so relatively simple when the blinders are off, that the scruffy discourses outside His truth become like dust of stallions kicking, in contrast to the peace of comprehensively resolving perspective when the word of God becomes the base for thought, and the stage for action of the mind.

Through the word of God, the Bible, not only are these chronic problems of philosophy without exception seen voided into clarity in composite collation and single perspective with meaning and substance, but they are so solved without that reductionism which is a mere evasion of issues, as common as deceit, and as useless as lies. Moreover, through His word and its principles and perspective, this resolution is wrought with facility, as if mountain ranges from a highest peak were seen in their relative domains, their river beds and correlations clear, as is the case at the South Australian Wilpena Pound, from St Mary's Peak.

In fact, the biblical perspective like such a summit of and for all, makes it easy to disentangle and review philosophic errors as shown for example in SMR Ch. 3 in general, and 307ff. in particular. Here then is rest for the mind as well as stimulus, delight for the questioning and questing reason as well as a shield of reality for the seeker who finds in this a rock not only higher than he, but an eyrie which exposes from its sublimity, what the plain loses in its dust. (Cf. Isaiah 33:14ff. with 55).

one more illustration of the intense and singular coherence of the whole body of method, since it but reflects the massive coherence of the realities when viewed from the word of God, like ranges spread out before the inspired eye. Made for man, it matches man and so enhances him, in internal verification.

Thus the inspiration of being able to see all things in coherent, rationally delicious, spiritually triumphant, explicatory penetration becomes an ease to the mind, a joy to the heart and a radical lift to the spirit, a thing of peace and nourishment, fortifying the personal; while the Spirit of Him whose word it is, at the same time brings personal meaning to the inter-relationship of the things, which are His, with one's own person. It is like some Summer cruise, with unending bliss on all sides. Not that there is no taking up of one's cross to follow Christ, since the world is hostile and it is war! (Ephesians 6); but there is an inward reality and a rational thrill which matches the depth of the spiritual experience of the One to whom all these things relate (John 14:21-23).

As is usual when the truth is exposed concerning a puzzle, mathematical, geometrical, or other, it becomes hard to see how on earth people could so have butchered the matter! That however is the nature of blindness, that it does not see; and when as biblically predicated of mankind without God, it is wilful, then shut eyes make sight the more difficult yet, as Christ indicated for many (Matthew 13:14-15). On the other hand, not only does God reveal to His children what He has done, as who He actually is, but He even strengthens them with might in the inner man, giving them illumination in a personal way (Ephesians 3:16, 1:17-19), as if a painter were meticulously to explain to an apprentice the wonders of his art.

When it is God who acts to instruct His creation, naturally, this supernatural zest becomes an illimitable privilege and delight. How clearly He shows that there is nothing too hard for the Lord! That too is verification, since just as He claims, so He does (Genesis 18:14). It is as natural to the supernatural as the light is to the sun.

Just as there is report that some who are physically deaf have come to consider their plight an advance or advantage, and delight in its usages, so here but in this case culpably, people tend to create a 'culture' which like a rampant vulture, pecks on, yes seeks to swallow up what is not desired (cf. Beauty for Ashes Ch. 3, TMR Ch. 8, SMR 252Aff., 252Iff.). In this way, convenient myths are created (cf. Delusive Drift or Divine Dynamic Ch. 7), as a substitute for the actual and demonstrable creation of creative minds such as those of men (cf. Secular Myths and Sacred Truth). These then become quagmires which trap the young, festering philosophies disadorning the swamplands they create, so leading to traditions which defile their possessors and render frustrated their victims.

However such vain cultures are unstable and fatally vulnerable, and their ludicrous tenor limits even in this world, their intrusive tenure, so that they writhe in discomfort abundantly deserved (cf. SMR pp. 380ff., Earth Chasm ... Ch. 1, SMR pp. 307ff.). This has the advantage however of showing more stunningly majestic in contrast, the purity of truth and its eminent functionality in the mind and heart of man, made by it, and for it, and not efficacious in the end, at all, without it, either practically or logically. With an irrational chip on his shoulder, to use computerese, man is scheduled for disaster, his vain visions becoming the foster-fathers of bedraggled splendours, arrested developments, endless collisions both with 'nature' and with the rest of his race, until the entirety becomes more like an object lesson for the guilt of declivity from God, than a life to be lived.

The 'chip', more horrendously, achieves more lasting tenure by the wilfulness of unwisdom, sponsoring the witlessness of its fruits. From the first, death was the penalty of sin, and without its remedy, in the redemption the Bible reveals in Jesus Christ, time is no balm, and effort is no resolution.

Let us however look further. It will bring back to mind some figures already noted.

On a nearby and parallel face, we find that all the resolutions duly made of the philosophic mess that man richly deserves, just as they explain all, so also they fit as one (cf. Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 13, Acme, Alpha and Omega ... Ch. 9). In stark contrast are the misdirected efforts, aspiring to categorically impossible substitutes for God, involving 'this unit' or 'that unit' of this kind or other, like making this part or that of an automobile its imaginary factory! They lead merely to frustration and impotence, as Einstein found readily enough (cf. SMR pp. 299 -303, Spiritual Refreshings loc. cit.), both in principle and in practice! Even profound genius cannot second guess God, or re-invent Him. What is made, remains in just that category in all its inabilities and abilities.

Of this kind are the hapless constructions of Marx, Freud and Darwin, all seeking explanations within what is made, and ignoring the making, the Maker and the design matrix in all of its operative features.

On this, see Repent or Perish Ch. 7, Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 9, esp. *1, The gods of naturalism have no go Ch. 25, Aviary of Idolatry, SMR pp. 925ff., and *2 below. Programmatic, they remove the validity of their own internalisation, like refugees from reason seeking to land on its shores; and by their own modelling of what they exclude, they become part of the processes which determine, not overlords able to inspect, let alone instruct others! Determination by forces is not determination by truth, but conformity to process.

To get beyond it, you need both liberty and absolute truth as shown. Man has both, but defiles the one and tends to ignore the other. Hence comes culture. While some of this may be beneficial, its trends in these last centuries has become lethal, just as at times it has been carnal, sensual, subversive, submersive and whatever other debasing thing appeals to man who, on the broad way, double checks his cheques but not his direction, so having a chequered career which assuredly does not bring down the chequered flag of victory, but the bankruptcy of careering downhill.

This is as it has been, was to be, and is eminent as it was foretold eminently to become (cf. Romans 1, II Timothy 3, I Timothy 4, II Peter 3:5-8, Joyful Jottings 8).

It is in line with specific prediction, generic analysis and tendential indications from the Bible, all three. In terms of method, this is one of the endless seeming ways, in which one rich vein of ore makes contact with ramifying parallels on all sides.

This is negative verification, that is, it verifies in the realm of negativities; but in terms of therapeutic release from such follies, which is likewise an arena of cohesion, we are enabled to see the inspiring flight into reality as in Little Things Ch. 5, or It Bubbles Ch. 9. It is like taking off from the top of a mountain to scan the terrain. Again, it is like handling an exquisitely knitted garment, and stretching it out, perceiving the interminable seeming intricacy of its dextrous art. This does not dissipate, being interlocked, strand on strand. Again, it is a matter of being seated on the rock of reason, reality and revelation, but this in reverse order! The first points, but the last is the culmination that becomes the basis!

Thus the return to intrinsic significance without reductionism or antinomy, in operable realism, then, as in the above references, enables avoidance of the monistic folly of trying to elevate the impersonal to final status (cf. SMR pp. 307 in its exhibit of the fantasy of folly), and this ludicrously by subversion of the personal, on which it heedlessly seeks to seat its validity.

What is contained in system is not its arbiter; and what is driven by dynamics of meaninglessness is no arbiter of meaning (cf. SMR pp. 294ff.), to instruct us. Such a basis becomes a pervasive limit to the status of its results; and what is derivative from the impersonal, by the logic of the personal, is irrational for that very reason. What you defile, you cannot use as basis, without being defiled; and what you dismiss, you cannot make rock, when it is stricken from the model's register. If you do, however, you are merely irrational and nothing more remains but to pursue realities with those who do not dump reason. For what gives to thought no intrinsically valid status, its logical status is null; for intra-systematics have no means of becoming their surveyor and judge (cf. SMR p. 305ff.).

In other words, you cannot logically abuse what is determinative, and be valid. Whatever sees must be capable, not subordinated by alien realities that dismiss its integrity, or else sight is without the significance assigned it. If then PERSON is adequate for discerning truth, it needs valid basis; but if not, it but spouts. Moreover, you cannot dispense with person's integrity by person. If it lacks it, it can do nothing here, so the dismissal is vain. If it has it, however, it needs assignable basis, not mere affirmation in fancy.

This must first unveil absolute truth outside any urgings and limits of internal systematics, and then make available this same truth in its own integrity, without subordination even in the process! As seen, this is precisely what biblical revelation provides; and in so doing, it exhibits in this, as in all other aspects, the requisites of coherence, validity and integrity. Because it is not only moving where these logical necessities repose, but where their verification mixes with multiplicious confirmations and singular logical cogency, lacking nothing, and in this is alone, the case is as shut as open: for it opens to the view only to be closure of the case.

In this, it is alone, being assessable by many means, as this Chapter is at some pains to exhibit. As nothing else meets the systematics of the case, moreover, this meets them with a fluency and flourish that is a finale to thought, indeed establishes it with the result.

Thus Biblical Christian Theism (BCT) having all these ingredients, the METHOD for the apologetics for the same exhibits this counter-distinguishing fact, and gathering relish with its sheer profundity and multiplicity, uncovers the sheer wonder of it all.

Let us then be clear. It is because BCT HAS these things that apologetics for it has and has had soaring success, and on the other hand, wilful follies seeking to avoid these realities naturally fail, have failed and so made the reputation of philosophy! It is categorically easier to be counsel for the truth than for fiction, let alone devious devices; and when the truth is made manifest as a Person with power and instruction, then the case advances to delectable heights.

It is a matter of rebellion not invalidity, which bewitches man, for the invalidities he faces are but a by-product of his glide from God and slide from significance that results. The first, rebellion in spirit, produces the second, invalidity of thought; it is this and not the creation which achieves such a dismal destiny! Restored by remedy, man once more is engaged in the crystalline beauty of validity of thought as virtue of life.

What is actual miscreancy has the mischief that accompanies it, and so whether in reason, logic, or any other discipline of understanding, there is endless TALK of progress; but in fact where this is so, mere regress or re-circulation ensures. If you do not have the horse-power to take your car up the hill, what are you do to ? Push it ? or ... invent something that will. Nothing that can be invented has infinity and beyond the temporal which is delimited; so the only alternative is to take what is there, which being eternal, actually requires no invention.

To be sure, man in his almost inerrant deviationism seeks still to invent (cf. Ecclesiastes 7:29, Romans 1:17ff.); but the advent of his inventions is always a stirring and a burring and a whirring, though with whatever ingredient, however illicit, it often seems culturally or psychologically proper for the age concerned (cf. A and F Schools), until its failure becomes a swift witness against its odium.

On a biblical perspective, such errors are not only predictable (cf. Ephesians 4:17-19 with Romans 1), but predicated of the end of our Age, in tumultuous proportions (Matthew 24). Put someone in the fire and it may not be too scorching at first, when just lit; but in time its ravages appear.

This cumulative and culminating aspect of man's errors as the Age reaches maturity, provides a double verification, a dual one indeed, with an integrity in its overall oneness of vision which is additional verification.

It is not only WHAT verifies alone which matters, it is HOW it does so; and the BCT has not only both, but facet upon facet, such as the WAY in which the fulfilments occur, rambunctious with rebellion and rampaging with blood (cf. the forecast of Revelation 6), as if they could not wait to fulfil anything and everything possible of the biblical analysis!

This is the Historical Prognosis Phase of BCT, which is dynamically allied to the Prophetic Prognosis Phase, a more generic aspect of prophecy as simple verification. These are really covered in IV above, but here given some further enrichment in concept. It also relates to VIII and XI, since God and not particles being ONE and ONE ONLY, there is always a blending and mutual fortification of aspects of His truth, which is yet another verification, that of essence.

A further aspect of this category of method, or phase, is this, and it is in one sense positive. Just as say England and America, the USA, showed a trend to advance formally and formerly when each was distinctive in the world for its (comparative) Christian emphasis, whether with literature, science, power, victory and liberty ascending like an eagle in flight: so now is its opposing dynamic found. This is one of disarray because of increasing withdrawal from the things, principles, morals and ways of God. It is like a nail further and further from its magnet, more and more weakly drawn to attachment. So do they advance again, but this time it is towards perdition.

So does the internal and erosive dynamic resulting from the breach of morals, truth and certainty, bring down with such advance whatever is high, to where it places itself below. This is in the realm of the increasingly spiritually sick and idolatrous, as occurred in the Roman Empire. (Cf. Pall of Smoke ... Ch. 9, News 73, 13, Joyful Jottings 14, 21, Secular Myths ... Ch. 3, Galloping Events Ch. 7). Britain soared when its basis was at least in form, biblical, and much in fact, from 1600-1940 or so; and USA did no less from its most Puritanical beginnings to the time of its dissociation from Biblical emphasis into various idealisms and ideologies to which it was always vulnerable, so that freedom gradually became virtual god or goddess, and truth and righteousness optional derivatives for many. Its fall, if it continues in this line of dissolution of duty and bereavement from beauty, does not rest on more than grease, which unlike rock, not only moves readily but aids movement.

Alas for excellence of spirit, and delight in spiritual things, that what makes a civilisation seem an example to the world, dominant indeed, can become through entanglements as if its high place were of its own doing, or its own excellence, the very occasion of downfall. It was indeed so with many before, as with Tyre, when the rendering is this: "You corrupted your wisdom by reason of your brightness" (Ezekiel 28:17 - "by reason of your splendour" as it may be rendered).

Biblically, the saints will temporarily have a hostile and alien world in the ascendency, and this is clearly coming like the wind of stupour from the blazing desert of corrupt, irrational and erosive philosophy (cf. Revelation 13:7) and religious mockery (cf. II Peter 2:1ff., Matthew 24:11,24). God is however not mocked, and the end of the Beast or international consortium of stupefied power pushers is distinctive, although not distinguished (cf. Revelation 19:15-20, II Thessalonians 2); for doom is never desirable. Indeed, if it has taken a time for the international aspect of grisly world rule to come, yet it is visibly coming in fulfilment of that intense realism which is a hallmark of the Bible.

This illustrates (in terms of VI above, but in a specialised sense) the fact that the biblical perspective and word not only EXPLAINS all the facets and functions of historical development over time, but exhibits WHY this is so. It does so not only in terms of rational principles, that is things surveyable and appreciable by reason, provided by revelation, but it terms of a close nexus of practicality and principle that becomes like a laboratory lesson, as distinct from the lecture that precedes it!

Here, although it is close to the Explication Phases, Qualitative and Quantitative, there is the emphasis on the actual accounting for things at the personal level, at the acme, so that it not merely shows WHAT happens, and HOW it happens, but more expressly WHY it does so and the practicalities of its eventuation. If the former categories are the multitudinous and the intermingling phases, this is the dramatically directive and the accounting phase.

Here, inside the counsel of God (cf. Pitter-Patter ... Ch. 4, SMR pp. 623ff.), you see the moral movements, the spiritual accruements, the patience and the discipline of God, as so often shown directly in the Bible as in II Chronicles 36, II Kings 17, Isaiah 1, 6. God does not always show all of His specialised intentions, but when He does, one gains the inestimable advantage of seeing examples of majesty at work.

Such is the atmosphere in Ezekiel 29, for example, where Egypt is given to Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, as reward and price for performing the Lord's discipline on other nations; before his own time comes up! (cf. Ezekiel 29:18ff., Jeremiah 50:29ff.). You see it in Psalm 2, in the interstices of God's gift and man's rebellion, in Micah 7 in the final resolution of the Israel question, where much love, much discipline and eventual faith and deliverance accrue; and again you find it in Romans 11, in the overall viewing of the justice and ground of the entire movement of God's actions with Jew first, and then Gentile, over a vast span of history, and you see the quality of mercy with the input of judgment with a certitude that mingling with practicalities, becomes shocking in intimacy mingled with scope. it is like seeing on operation on video, with all the blood vessels being cut and tied, and the bones cut for opening up, before the remedy is applied.

Not merely, then, does the biblical perspective explain and validate such aspects in creation, as beauty, morals, liberty, reason and felicity, peace and disquiet, guilt and grace and so forth, as listed and referenced above: it actually exhibits their nature and significance in their final repose. It portrays developments in time, in history and these with explanations and descriptions at the level of ultimate direction.

It is one thing to solve a problem; it is another to comprehend its elements or elemental aspects and function in its field; and indeed, it is yet a further to find the personal basis of them all in their engaging and remarkable unity in God, from whom they come, to whom men need to come to have any idea of their way (cf. Psalm1); from whom, not coming, they inherit their desires (Proverbs 1), This, it is that vacuity which proudly masquerades as wisdom, but is not so in reality, and which, in the profuse groanings in history, is failed furiously as it flails.

In one sense, in method, this is going from metaphysics to ontology, and from this to deity! In another formulation, this means that we are moving from seeing these things as FROM God, to seeing them, by His revelation, as WITHIN the purposes and principles which He has set, proceeding from Him in His own oversight and control, personal manifestation and exhibition. Such things are to be found only in revelation that is explicitly His own, which gives us this huge bonus for finding His word in the first place.

Treasure found has new limits for the finder, and new liberties. God once found has no limits being infinite, that is when He is found as He offers Himself which He, being personal, is in His own way only. It is then, according to His word, that things are comprehensible to the uttermost. This does not mean that mystery is absent, in the sense that for now, we know in part (I Cor. 13); but it does mean that what is shown covers the case magnificently, and what more is to be found in heaven. It is not contrary but consummative, being beyond the test, the smog of persecution and the scenes of sin, without impediment in its wonder: for then, it is beheld directly in its beatific reality (I Corinthians 13), when His children know as they are known.

Finally let us look at two more FACES, the LIBERTY, LAW and LOVE one and the CONSISTENT COROLLARY one. The former is an example of XVI (Ground Phase) and the latter of V above, with more detail for delight to the heart and mind that knows God, and verificatory to the one who does not.

Like a mountain range being climbed, this has many faces; and now we survey two in a little more magnification.

We come now to what is really an exhibit in the field of IV and in particular XVI above, the GROUND PHASE of explication, as attestation of source of the word, and hence verification. Here we find an area where, without these precise ingredients, resolution of the potential antinomies would have been impossible. That is the sort of thing which by its unique validation, beyond all competition, is an expected resultant of reality, and the more so when the same has been found personal.

Our visit then is to elements of the arena of predestination and freewill, as have been presented already in The PQ.

Indeed, here we find why perfectly inveterate is the human tendency to affirm as truth what he has to say, whether concerning this or that ultimate, and this no less when the alleged 'truth' is some denial of this or that. It occurs even when man wishes to deny truth with the 'truth' that it is not there! He is not insane, merely reduced to inanity by departure from design.

It is explained fully from the fact that truth is the design opportunity for man, and freedom is the designed option, allowing divorce that leaves the design drive intact, but not its destiny! When in the revelation of God, one can look at what is there, it is interminable in its explication and undeviating in its coverage, this owing not merely to the realities themselves, but to the dynamic of life which sourced in God, has there its base, power and paragon.

When owing to unremedied rebellion, one cannot so look, then the form remains but the function and facility is departed. Hence the behaviour of man in this in a way which is virtually endemic!

These are some of the resultants of divine revelation, showing the relationship of liberty, lord and love, truth and law.

This could equally be called
an aspect of the PERSPECTIVE PHASE of Biblical Christian Apologetics,
but the two are so closely interwoven that it seems best to make this part of
the GROUND PHASE,
so making this

In this, because of man's tendency to reject the word of God, some even going so far as formally or formalistically to accept it, while retaining rejection of its advice, so that the 'acceptance' is mere appearance and not reality (cf. John 5:39-40), a drawing near with the lips but not with the heart, with the form but not with the fact: there is a resultant both predicted and verifiable in historical actuality.

Such omission shows why man, becoming frustrated, rebels the more, why false vision - with an obstinacy resultant from abstinence from the living God to whom His word inexorably leads, which would be courage and wisdom if correctly set - leads to rivers of blood. This readily becomes both metaphorical and messy, and in both cases tragic.

It shows moreover why inferior because false religions, like other adventures outside reality but here with more impetus, lead to aggression, their exponents seeking to dominate with force. Inferiority loves domination, and to domineer, because quite simply there is no other way, truth being void to it.

If maximal intensity focusses because of the significance of the area in view, its imagined ultimacy in thought and life, then maximal folly can result readily. And it does, our generation generating such rivers of violence in the name of false of intemperate religion that its rebuke for undervaluing the entire reality of the ocularly invisible, for so long in tepid irrationalities, becomes heavy indeed! Ignore soil erosion and your crops will fail; ignore spiritual erosion and your blindness will tell. It is telling, spelling it out with letters as high as man.

Why however should this specific field be noted, when other facets of the omitted faith which deals with reality as it is, as demonstrated, could lead to much the same resultant ? namely, frustration, desperation and this with deluded dedication, domineering and violence. Let us give an answer to this question.

It is of special acuity here because when the deterministic fallacy (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7) has man by person declare person invalid because externally constrained beyond its own parameters and essence, and without understanding of it, then the self-contradiction makes light of what man is, and so induces desperation, futility and disturbance. On the other hand, where liberty is so exalted, in the other extreme resulting from missing the truth of the word of God, that it becomes a virtual god in itself, as is the case increasingly in the United States, then flights of fervour without limit seem the more interesting, significant and apt for man; and the resulting frustration of finding these no better than that of doomed Icarus, leads to more eruptions defeated desire.

It is as if lassoed libido in fury seeks to break its ropes, for it never realises its hopes.

To pursue the image of Icarus: when flying too high, man finds the wax on his wings melt under the heat of the sun, while then the waters of the Aegean, being metaphorical only in this case, produce a reaction and response. Humbled man, as if laughed at by life, determines at whatever cost, that he WILL prevail. When WILL won't have God and won't accept defeat, there is a resultant conflict ignoble and ultimate. This is seen in the scene of mankind at present; and this aspect is one very significant contributor, one animus for increase of adversity, escalation of horror and rampant slides of the lavas of the unexpected, for when rumblings disturb the land, stability shows more keenly by its absence, the beauty its presence had provided.

Where thought cannot prevail, blood may be paid by opponents; and where culture collapses, someone must pay: but this is the more so, when the cause of its collapse, this beyond all others, becomes the fixation of thought and the desideratum of the heart, so that it is like someone who is drunk, becoming convinced that only more alcohol can help. Thus does man come to bind himself, blinded in spiritual arrogance, profane in polluted heart and seized by inebriated will.

Freedom CANNOT be found despite all the political theories that are as waste matter, recovered from the drain and put on the throne; and force MUST be used to replace what actuality cannot contribute. Such is the dilemma of man in this rebellious phase, and not few are those who both do, and have done this, whether in the appalling molested Sudan, in Biafra, in Rwanda, in India, China or Russia in its former merciless magnificence as the USSR, in the Inquisition or the Holy Roman Empire, most unholy, and vainly imperial, whether in al Qaeda with its allies, their beheadings and their bombs, in the selection of children for suffering, as when PLO operatives blow up Israeli school buses with minimal media coverage, or when Chechen fundamental Moslem extremists fashion their thoughts on the operating table of the bodies of partially or totally murdered children. You cannot partially murder ? Not physically, but mentally and morally, you may, when the ... residue is a lifetime of anguish.

Man so acts. He acts in rebellion against God first of all. It leaves him swamped in oily marshes, red-tinged, but not with sunset.

Freedom however can be found, and this has been gloried in, inside the cover of the covenant of Christ, for millenia. It is simple and simply unbelief which, refusing the solution, insists on imposing the error, like some child in mathematics class who in error, by pride and force seeks to 'convert' the class to his views, and so spoil all. Such is the nature not only of the current Moslem menace (cf. Divine Agenda Ch. 6, More Marvels ... Ch. 4), but of the address of the sects to confused humanity. In the midst of man's various, sometimes furious and sometimes tepid and tedious rebellions, this brings no small additive also; for freedom in chains to the slavery of false prophets becomes a voluntary obsession with force, often used psychologically by varied religious leaders, so that the heart's fixation removes all possible liberty and leaves that inconstancy of mind which politicians can the better use.

That in turn can readily lead to force whether of 'control' or arms; and to the denial of freedom as we shall see, is in great danger of arising like a poised dagger, even in Britain! (cf. Ch. 5 below).

Truth has no options; you take it or leave it. If you leave it, error has no reward and its cumulative consequences, often indirect, make fodder of man.

Man without God is like a swimmer without shore. It is tiresome and leads to desperation.

When however man accepts his place as product of God, and his eminence as a personal product, and receives with joy his choice emplacement as made in the image of God who not being spatial imparts in this to man, power to communicate with Him and to relate personally: then there is first of all hope. (As to space, it is one of God's creations along with time - Romans 8:37-39, as inspection of these verses biblically demonstrates.)

What is this relationship biblically, and how does it verify by its uniqueness, the validity which has been demonstrated in the realm of revelation ?

It is one in which man finds pardon for sin, which being wrong is an oppressive intrusion into truth, and hence both a destabilising force and a frustrating fulmination. It is one in which man finds power for living, and hence to avoid inept frustration through impossible aspiration or desperate despair. Again, here is to be found a companionship with the Creator, who being intensely creative, is fascinating as Father. Further, no more is the vain aspiration for total autonomy, liberty for man to be 'god' in view, so that the inane antics of the various unimpeded philosophies of right and power such as the Nazi and the Communist, brothers in shame, become mere emblems of error, not invasive engines.

Again, there is no gloom such as is apt in deterministic imaginations, which removing significance from man, or else leading to unviable bursts of hope to manage the universe and make it become what will make man be what he autonomously wants to be, merely contradict themselves. If indeed, this were so, then man would be unable to know it, or the truth: for truth to be known, it must both exist, not contrary to the assumed model, and be able to communicate itself, lest in the act, the recipient exclude by its own parameters, the very thing being transmitted.

Biblically, these conditions are met; and are testable so that it is with reason and not lofty dream, founded on exactly nothing, that conviction acts (not BECAUSE of it, but with it, since faith has its own ambit). With this, the anomaly of man loudly proclaiming the truth, while divorcing himself from its very existence, is avoided. The folly of voiding freedom while displaying it in error and the model in which error must inhere, since those who differ are deemed in error, is equally avoided. Manifest muddle is replaced in biblical declaration by coherent, cohesive, comprehensive and explicative conditions.

Thus a determined man is a slave in essence and by nature, even before he seems to implement visions in his slavery. The more he strives, the more he illustrates what he is, on this model. Determinate by fiction (but far more than good for him, because of his anti-divine divorce, cf. Psalm 1:4-5), determined by desire, he is the very antidote of rest and the contrary of composure. Small wonder psychiatric horrors surge in the world, like marauding star-fish, destroying the reefs of beauty. They are but a natural outcome, in much, of the disorienation through desire which is a cultural pandemic.

Such is rebellion; but there is also the way of peace, first with God and then in heart cf. Isaiah 26:1ff.).

All these frustrations and impulsions and compulsions being gone, the man of God can have peace (Philippians 4:1-6, Ephesians 2:14). But does he ? Yes, for in addition to the pardon and the power, there is the perspective. Now guilt has meaning and the masses are not mad, but merely sleepy in spirit or unconscious, because unaware of the Lord, and so dulled and dimmed in heart. The reality is true; the feeling may be diverse, for when equipment is misused there is little limit to the awkwardness and oddity of the result: hence despite the depth and basic impotence of modern psychiatry, it is leaning increasingly on drugs of varied impact and uncertain value (cf. SMR Ch. 4).

In his new perspective, man sees God as Creator, as good, as loving, as kind, as sacrificial incumbent of the post of Saviour, as becoming man and so enabling man to see purity in its source, truth in its personal reality, power in its place and peace from this truth in the mercy which enables such a despatch. Not dealing with less than God, since ONLY God is Saviour (Isaiah 43:10-11), and Christ is the Saviour whose name has no other conjoined (Acts 4:10-11), man has direct access not to bureaux and officials, not to priests and clamour, but to deity Himself, where is a peace from infinity, as when one swims in some vast fresh-water lake, surrounded by wandering paths directing to snow-clad mountainous heights, all composed and constant. So seeking and thus discovering truth, and finding it by this provision, the man, woman or child of God has the peace of a reality beyond all that he COULD create, had he the power: for it is eternal and constitutive for the very composition of his own being.

Where love is present, and ONLY THEN, the necessary action of God in selecting those who are to be His children, or more accurately, implementing His eternal selection (Ephesians 1:4), becomes not a self-trip but a truth circuit. Thus the God who WOULD HAVE ALL (I Timothy 2, Colossians 1) to be reconciled to Himself, whether in heaven or on earth, becomes the One whose love as all but ceaselessly shown in the Bible (cf. Matthew 23:;37, SMR Appendix B, Hosea 7:1, Jeremiah 51:9, 48:36, Jonah 4:10-11, Ezekiel 33:11) WILL NOT force, but will rather desist: yet not lightly!

Thus the integrity of truth, not the fulfilment of personalised satiation of desire becomes the criterion of divine selection; and in truth, since God is love (I John 4:7-8), not merely a possessor, this love is consigned by nothing ulterior. Hence, both as a result of this reality, and by direct affirmation of God, any outside the kingdom are so by their own preference (John 3:19). This love of God, while allowing their persons to be fulfilled in their false advocacy, not merely does not initiate this deranging process, but knowing to the uttermost, does not let it happen awry, amiss. It occurs before Him, and it has its finales of horror (cf. II Thessalonians 2:10), but only with great grief. It is as when a son refusing to cease smoking, finds himself soon bound in the resultant grip of cancer.

Thus even the Christ Himself actually wept for the city which refusing His advocacy, doomed itself. This it did by exposure of its sin to truth without the mercy God persistently had offered, a mercy despatched on the Cross, and yet awaiting that same nation, until it repents (Luke 19:42ff., 23:27ff., Isaiah 30:15-18).

In this way, the innate sinfulness of man without God, who cannot choose what his state excludes (I Corinthians 2:14, John 1:12ff., Romans 9:16), cannot elevate himself above what he is, or choose in terms which contradict his spoiled structure and spiritual strictures, becomes no adequate barrier against love; while God choosing, overturns all dangers of time or season, psychological oddities or other ingredients unworthy of the dignity of eternity or such results; and so ensures no 'misses'.

No one therefore enters hell except over the dead body of Christ, in this, that it is a gift sufficient for all, apt for all, offered to all and on behalf of all (I John 2:1-2). Moreover, although it does not of course PAY for all (Romans 8:32, Matthew 26:28, Isaiah 53:1-6 - the 'healed' being the 'we' whose sins are laid on Him), but is applied only for 'many': this is not an exclusion for the God of love, but a redemptive fact.

None being paid for can fail, since whom He justified He glorified (Romans 8:29ff., 17); and indeed, there is eternal redemption (Hebrews 9:12), and what payment of the infinite is inadequate!

However, none who do not come can be paid for, on the same ground; for if paid for, they are redeemed and His BY redemption! If they do not come, how are they His ? and if they elect to be excluded, how can they be paid for, and how does anyone pay for what he does not own! When God owns by ransom, it is not merely eternal redemption, but inalienable by mutation, a transformation back to the image of God as first placed in man (I John 3:9, Colossians 3:10), so that (Romans 5:1-11, 8:1-10), it would be like trying to make a flow turn into a mosquito. It is simply no more of that type. What God redeems has His 'seed', His spiritual nature ingrained.

Man is either redeemed or not; and if redeemed is kept (John 10:9,27-28); but if shutting the eyes, and alienated ultimately, his is neither place nor mutation, neither transformation nor truth, neither pardon nor peace. His debts unpayable, his peace forfeit, such are compared by God to the marshy wastes not flushed by fresh water (Ezekiel 47 cf. Biblical Blessings Ch. 5). There is nothing hybrid.

Not so is the love of God, who knowing His own, pays for them; but with weeping in the Messiah, shows grief at the refusal of many who thus excluding themselves, have nothing put to their emptily sustained accounts! Appearance may masquerade and affirmation protest, but transactional analysis is void. Such are those who in appearance may even deceive themselves, living their own lives, and placing a spare tag about themselves which transforms nothing but their integrity!

In this way the love of God is not an aristocratic manipulation, but a sincere seeking; and not another name for force either, but a glowing reality from which all human love in man, made in God's image, takes its source. This in turn explains why man loves, loves to die for another man, and so on; for although the devices of sin make devils of many, the intrinsic realities of man's origin and construction lead to many actions of worth and wonder, angelic in disposition and delightful in aspect. As with truth, so with love, man has difficulty in total divorce from that for which, and by which ... he is made! This is yet further verification, which like water in flood, flows on all sides.

By such things, man's life is shown, like snow on the peaks of mountains arid below, and becomes a thing of far more excellence than the cynic will allow, in his reductionist fantasy. Indeed, now there is simply no need, however evasive and corrupt, to try to paint man in this or that obviously fantasising and delusive caricature; for his evil is all but fathomless, and the good he often seeks and shows has heights of wonder attached to it, remnants of the glory from which he was formed, before sin deformed him.

The cleavage of good and evil, and of goodness and evil in the ranks of man is likewise explained, as is the passion for beauty to be found in the world, amidst the unclean and the repugnant, resultants of a curse MADE ON wonderful creation, which declares forth its wonder constantly (cf. Beauty in indexes, and Beauty for Ashes, with Beauty of Holiness), just as corrosion and corruption blare their fearful music as well.

Man's dignity if you will, or exalted meaning if you won't, becomes now a thing not for frustration and desperation, improvisation and innovation in nonsensical desperation, as is common throughout history. Rather there is a past and a present for the man of God. As to the past, his siting is in this schema: that goodness is his source, evil is his selection, yet goodness churns within him by virtue of his construction, while evil yearns by force of his corruption. This itself might even lead to violence of some dimension, through a sense of violation or vileness; but instead, the God of love provides the power to triumph over the evil and implement the good (cf. Romans 6-8), so that victory, not defeat, meaning not muddle, vision not mere vigour, comes and reality shines like an impossible dream (which it was for the deluded who deemed it but a dream), come true.

The determined aspects of the creation which make for the stage setting in which personality and meaning can translate themselves with relative ease, these become as desirable, just as automatic gears in a car which far from defeating driving liberty, the more enable it. This aspect, again, is like a platform for performers; and it is good to have it for setting and stability, when once the folly of imagining oneself to be part of it, is past.

For much in man, this is not past, and he fritters his time in inane pursuits which inflame his heart and pollute his mind, emptying his pocket of billions, as he reels in his dreams of the impossible, trying to force life out of the inanimate, will out of the willed, liberty out of the constrained and love out of stone. Saying to a tree, You are my father! and to a stone, You gave birth to me! laughs Jeremiah of such self-destructive affirmations, themselves the very means of annihilation of the validity of the thoughts they think! (Jeremiah 2:27).

Can the bound be free to think ? can thought arise from objects of sequence and happening ? Does logic inhere in happening, as if its internal constraints removed, its imaginative construction personalised and essentialised, its product-status could become that of producer, whilst matter unmindful of such thoughts, languishes without any power to do anything in this direction
whatever ?

Is reality to be invented, is the empirical as likewise the rational to be ignored, so that the deadness of soul-less insatiability for dream can be indulged ? Is the bound to be free to validate its binding, being bound, and is nought to equal infinity ? Is not hell precisely what is PREFERRED in kind, so that its camp is the kinship of calling ? Would not heaven be horror for such, since truth is intolerably tedious! In time when our time is distilled away, and the constraints of the temporal yield to those of eternity, the very realities themselves become the more impactive, having no shield in eventive^*ecover.

Is this contra-factual dream of pseudo-science to continue, while logic laughs ? and is prodded matter to become the source of itself, when nothing vomited clay, clay squirmed into thought, and thought found will to add, out of the summoned regions of nothing, that contemporary garland which but exhibits the emptiness of alienated thought, as if Punch Magazine were alive from the dead, and this its first new volume of wit.

Truth is not found on trees, in stones or in the whole panorama of creation except in this, that it requires for Maker the One who has it, without whom man is a muddle of meaninglessness, only with effrontery and logical antilogy declaring even this, since on any such model, he fails to reach credit rating in the truth stakes, at all. You cannot have what on your own model, is not there.

No so is the case with those persons who find in a Father of dimensions sufficient for their trilogy of mind, matter and spirit, the wisdom of truth, and in the Saviour He has sent, the way to abide in it.

These are no more confused with the driver, or the driven, taking rather their place as neither gods without power or glory, nor as objects without basis or cause. Rather are they now those who can then delight in the facets of creation, no longer confusing them with their own persons, in the image of God (cf. Romans 1:22ff., 28ff.). No more is man what the Bible calls a fool! (Psalm 57). Instead of defiling wisdom into folly, he forsakes folly as wisdom becomes the gift of God to him. This delightful provision is as with the wisdom so zealously offered in Proverbs 1, where however after the passionate offer of peace in truth, the case becomes negative, the fool becomes fastidious in his clouds of wilfulness, and the journey following in this chapter, reveals the spotted fruits of rejection.

What however where this appeal is not rejected ? Now man CAN be different, without his HAVING FIRST to BE better in order to choose the better; and the guarantee is the love of God. It is God who chooses (Romans 9:16), but in love that would have all (Colossians 1:19ff.), He chooses, and He chooses what He has foreknown before the creation (Ephesians 1:4), where sin does not require superiority to other sin, or sinner to other sinner, to do better, since its presence is not in designate force before man is created. Indeed, it is intended that this very love divine should be the topic of a compendium from our site, the next volume for the set, In Praise of Christ Jesus! Small wonder, for here is the key which the power of God moves to open the door to peace and truth for man.

Nothing less than this divine selection can achieve the result; nothing else can remove the incredible horror and forcible intrusion of the extraneous into the ultimacy, as would occur if a slightly better man, being better parented and educated, could achieve a decision which would lead to a better eternity: so that he could boast (or perhaps even gloat) of his accomplishments; and such a channel would be a contrary bane even in heaven! His 'flesh' would be better and his eternity correlative, so that liberty would be null, and a species of spiritually aristocratic unreality, at a premium. The better man wins, being better.

This is not the biblical depiction and it contradicts it at every point. That in turn is one of the interminable verifications of the wit of Holy Writ, which never fails in its consistency, coherence and comprehensive coverage.

Not only does Holy Writ depict what stands, but it avoids what falls, as any equipped with infinite knowledge would know to do, not in the perils of avoiding error, but with the frank and robust certainty of KNOWING what he is doing. It is only God who is, as shown, in this position (SMR), and it is only here, in His word, that eminently testable results are available, as likewise in Christ, the epitome and crux of the word of the Book.

What then ? Naturally, and this again, that becomes one more verification and validation of the truth of the Bible at this GROUND and PERSPECTIVE level Indeed, Paul speaks of just such a madness of gloating, and excluding it from the truth of God, pours upon any such thing, a wholly justified contempt. For this see Romans 3:27ff., with Ephesians 2:1-12).

Being a better being is a RESULT, and not a cause of the election, the choice of God! (Ephesians 2:8-10). Freedom with its responsibility overtone, guilt-wrap for sin and need of pardon nestles into this situation, and although sins mars its operation, it does not at all mar the operation of God.

Again, nothing less than paid for pardon can allow justice with munificent and magnificent mercy to be without dint or deviation, and so truth without harassment; and nothing less than the payment of Christ in the form of man can justly remit the sin of man, when the infinite in finite format took what was coming to the finite sinners whom He redeemed.

Finally, we give further attention in the CONSISTENT COROLLARY PHASE ( V above).

In this world, the seasons themselves pulse with creative power, installed cyclically within the very structure and ambit of creation, so that Spring a thousand times arrests cessation, and dynamising afresh, spreads forth the diligent and often delicate abundance of beauty and strength, while Winter exposes the basics and Autumn signifies rest.

Here thought dominates in law, which casts its line over diversities like imaginations, held in forms, the very stuff of design itself; and contrary to anything contrary, it persists. Intelligence in its main strength is conferred on man, with which to appreciate the divine exhibits, of which he himself is one. Thus arise in turn his dilemmas and antilogies, when he seeks to act as if god and truth in his own right, or seeks to depress his status to that of mere object, without knowledge, and yet knowing it to be so!

It is the catch 22 situation in which whatever he does, becomes self-contradiction, until he returns to fact and faith alike, in the God of creation. In this, is there is both a delightful irony, and a telling rebuke. It is moreover a display of the impotence of pollution before purity, and of misused imagination before reality.

Let us however return to the seasons, for such revolt in man is ever unseasonable. Thus shelved in situ in creation are the more and the less aspects of its Author's depiction, like the throb of a creator's heart, and reminders of creation come in each birth, each flower, each fresh herb awakening in Spring as from sleep, and at that, festooning the creation with fresh tenderness and strength, but this always within the parameters of the often most intricate and ingenious designs (cf. SMR p. 211ff.).

Yet to those who, forgetful in vision as in reason, imagine things just as He in His infinitude imagined them, but do so in a riot of unreasonable self-affirmation, like a puny, pugilistic baby, in wilful disease of volition: to these comes the confirmed defilement of His image as they seek wildly to construct gods of their own, to invent them in the midst of their own impotence, to import them from nowhere and imagine them anywhere. So they make their gods, whether barren and austere, as blank as the face of the shocked, or garlanded with useless glories. These are the gods which demonstrably lack the gifts of creation (cf. TMR Ch. 1), but not the facility for molestation of the same, through the distorted mind of subverted man.

As Jeremiah was inspired to put it, "the gods which did not make the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under these heavens" (Jeremiah 10:11). Unfortunately, there are many who will perish with them, these inane creations of creatively minded image-bearers of the God of creation; they shall fail like sailors in canoes in mid-Atlantic, in wilful insubordination amid the thrashing elements where they cannot abide, trusting themselves to floating graves.

These developments are far from being merely individual, but afflict races, civilisations and cultures, sometimes repetitively as the mercy of God allows more time (cf. II Chronicles 36), sometimes over centuries before the end comes. Further, the career of the whole humankind, now increasing and in more and more ways and in more and more examples, most unkind, moves like a turgid stream to the river mouth.

False gods and frustrated man, in passionate decline, and obsessive obscuration wedded to obfuscation, move together to their dénouement as if a play in Shakespeare, where Act V allows no successor!

In this, they excel. In this, the twenty first century is the exponent extraordinaire!

Thus does even rebellion exemplify in the heights of its liberties and the depths of its defilement, the massive power and active singularity of its divinely dowered gifts. Man is geared in the image of God to handle many levers, and futilely at times imagining himself one more, seeks to relax in the muddle and so bring disaster; or imagining himself god, seeks to make more or fondle fetiches and then revolt because it is all so impersonal, as programs tend to be! So does creation reflect at its peak, the mind of its Maker, while the judgments that afflict the earth, more personal than mere parallels to refusal to respond to reality, as with failure to add more oil to a labouring engine, in increasing disconformities, alike attest man's active decline.

Now we see what even patience does to evil effrontery, sustained over each generation. God is patient, but not futile; and when His power acts, man is apt to complain, or to exult in God his Saviour as the case may be. It is rather like insisting on being on the wrong side of the road. It is not that tragedy is unfortunate in such a case; it is that any continuation is fortunate!

This generation is seeking the accelerator, as has been provided for good, and uses it vapidly for the acme of mockery; but alas, such but accelerates their own godless doom.

Indeed, no sooner does affliction pass than spiritual effrontery returns which, having had its day, eventually passes as did the "three frogs"^*3 . What of these ? In 2 anointing wars, filled with hope, man was by such hopping madness accelerating to the end, the coming of the dénouement itself as righteousness paid and wickedness costed its charts. In that twentieth century was the time when mannerless madness in company with morally skeletal cadavers sought to prevail for super-races or super-systems which merely, in retrospect, evoke laughter at morbid delusions; and how those delusions bit (cf. Aviary of Idolatry, SMR pp. 127ff.)!

Even judgment grows to the predicted crises as one more aspect of the Consistent Corollary Phase. This is seen not merely in the predicted raging waters (Luke 21), the hearts failing for fear, the "distress of nations with perplexity", the current coin of the twenty first century, but in the intemperance and violence sought even where once freedom flourished. Examples abound, but one takes merely three.

These examples are firstly, the New Vikings in England: this virtual war on freedom is a movement which merely epitomises what has long been in the making. And what is that ? It is irrationality plus effrontery heavy-handedly impaling the famed British liberty with broken javelins, in the field of education (cf. Beauty for Ashes Ch. 3).

Secondly, we come to the Australian defilement of religion in urbane ignorance, in South Australia, which so few seem to mind, in what was the Education Department: it is this together with intolerant subversion of academic liberty (cf. TMR Ch. 8). The mixture is implosive, gaining in appalling sequence a disorientation for the subjected student victims which is difficult to imagine, except in such a setting as this generation has now become. Its culture vultures appear voracious, though those who train them appear ignorant of their capacities. Thus, with such illustrations merely of widespread evils, the world lurches not only in physical climate, but spiritual status as well. You cannot feed in this illiberal fashion, in substitution for education, without results; and where truth is bound by directive, liberty is derailed.

The third is the al Qaeda form of religious persuasion, which makes blood of sacrifice to be supplied by the plaintiff, not a novel though a ghastly and pagan concept of abuse of liberty and meaningless vileness. Here the conviction and the imposition is not legal, but directly spiritual in kind (cf. Divine Agenda Ch. 6). It does not merely detach truth from the whole, and implant a philosophy; it executes in both senses, in terms of its religion. This is not new, but new is its twenty first century efflorescence in a destructiveness which acts as if to turn the tables on civilisation by death, and to evacuate the power of life in its entrails of destruction.

A fourth example, already noted, we plan to expose in a subsequent chapter, Ch. 5 below, and this, once again, is in England, where the very pith of intolerance of truth in favour of 'survival' comes unblushingly to surface; or should we say, drops into the ocean, since it comes from 'higher up'!

So do these phases all unite in one, inventive of collaborative confirmations, both myriadfold and interweaving, so providing that saliently customary attestation of truth.

In all the deviations from this word of God, man is as one play-acting 'God', an imposture that is definitionally fatal, just as it is observable with predictable results. These accrue with justice, as the day of mercy slowly passes, like Autumn leaves, reluctant to leave but sure to do so, at the onset of Winter.

This is taken from It Bubbles ... Ch. 9, and placed here for convenience. It has been however expanded for our present purpose. See also here TMR Ch. 5, SMR Chs. 3 and 10.

How strange that those who excise truth by having no absolute truth available, are so absolutely sure of the truth of what they as if in a dream, propound!

It must be there, truth, and available as such, to be inhabitant of one's discourse.

There must be a valid reality which IS this, and it must be willing for you to have what it has, and you must be enabled to receive it, for any such delight as propounding TRUTH about the nature of things, to be even possible.

This means that you need the objective source (demonstrated as in SMR cf. TMR Ch. 5), AND His demonstrated diction, and in this, His sure affirmation of its availability by His own decision. Together with this, there is necessity that you actually gain the use of this to find what then verifies itself with the reason God has provided to each of us. This involves a personal readying (cf. John 5:39-40), for this cannot prevail or avail as an exercise in imagination, any more can an imaginary rocket reach the actual moon; for rather does it need action that acquires. Without this, the possibility is not the actuality, and becomes but one more dream. Existence of objective truth, its availability, and the conditions of its consignment, these are the sina qua non, the indispensable ground for meeting reason with truth.

Deny this, and at this level, you merely deny the grounds of your own discourse. Affirm it, and you find the consistency, harmony, absence uniquely both of antilogies and antinomies, together with the rigour of the rational, without the rigors of rationalism.

In other words, if you follow reason and affirm truth, there must BE truth for you to affirm it. It is no use affirming something to have a quality which your own presuppositions delete in advance!

Your model cannot consistently preclude truth while you as if asleep, affirm that it is true. Mere reaction is not truth, but a happening without the capacity to evaluate. Conceived of in a world of simple events, transpirings and occurrences, it is irrelevant to the necessity back of any attempt to affirm truth, as distinct from occurrence.

A good preliminary to this point is found in Secular Myths, Sacred Truth Ch. 7, as included inset, below. (See also SMR Ch. 3, Barbs, Arrows and Balms 6 -7.)

This refers to the nature of preliminary assumptions, their legitimacy or otherwise and results.

and other enormities of self-contradiction,

there are results in the field of validity.

What are these ? Since SUCH a model excludes truth as knowable, hence it violates validity at the outset, removing the grounds of its own discourse.

It is also irrational, since having so removed by mere will the grounds of its discourse, it refuses to employ reason where it leads, but instead leads reason where it has to go to conform to the imagined, self-contradictory model. Reason molested is irrationality.

Not so is the case when such a model is not taken, but one follows reason, as in SMR, to the necessary result in deity. This is shown in Ch. 1 of that trilogy, and furthered in Chs. 3 , 5 and 10, while confirmed in verification in the other chapters. In passing, it is is noted that attempts to evacuate causality itself from legitimacy

In short, reason followed in a way that does not, as in monism and determinism (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7), preclude truth itself, is the only logical avenue of research.

This then leads as shown in the SMR trilogy, and as therein demonstrated, to the necessity of God, to the certainty of His self-revelation and of His conferring of the same outside human conditioning as a participant in it, and basis in it in the chapters noted above, especially.

That in turn leads to the Bible, which alone meets the logical criteria; and which by verification validates your use of reason. Thus what began as uniquely rational, for all models which act on the basis of revealed and obtainable absolute truth, ends as uniquely verified, since few are the religions which assert humanly unpenetrated divine diction of a systematic character (cf. SMR Appendix D), wholly divinely delimited doctrine; and no other religion has the outrageously obvious tests to verify, that the Bible has, or anything in the most remote way comparable. This is of course just what the Bible says (Isaiah 41, 43, 48).

Further, NO other religion meets the demands of reason in terms of claimed revelation, as shown in SMR pp. 48ff. and elsewhere.

In such a way, you show for Christianity, in terms of the Bible, a situation unique both in being religious and rational, on the one hand, and then, both religious and validated, on the other. Its validity is entirely unique; its rationality the same. It is not reason which disavows it. Such negativity must come from other sources than this!

See on this theme also, Christ, the Wisdom of God and the Power of God Ch. 6.

These gentlemen, Marx and Darwin, were crypto- as well as pseudo-prophets, in this,
that their words were meaningless in the intensity of their sheer irrationalism,
except in terms of a Maker and a Meaning, both of which do not inhere in the meaningless

(cf. SMR Ch. 3, Christ, the Wisdom and the Power of God Ch. 6,
It Bubbles ... Ch. 9, Repent or Perish Ch. 7,
Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 9, esp. *1, et al., News 94,
TMR 7, TMR 8, Three Fogs, Little Things Ch. 5,
Barbs, Arrows and Balms 19, 29).

Storming into being, their theories rested on a support logically necessary, in model absent, in a welter of that spurious combination of invisible imports and impossible exports (cf. esp.TMR 8, Three Fogs).

*3 This depiction is from That Magnificent Rock, Ch. 8, and an excerpt
appears to our present point, below.

The Three Frogs

The Book of Revelation also gives indices for the ungodly myths of our day. Thus we find in Revelation 16:13, three highly mobile and doubtless, as is normal in such cases, voluminously communicative FROGS which come out of the mouth of the 'dragon', a symbol for Satan in his worldly vestments. They are 'unclean spirits' which seem to have such flexibility of passage that they come not only from the mouth of the dragon, but from that of the beast of political pomp and pretension that seeks the worship of man, and from the false prophet, whose austere duty would appear to be to 'interpret' the unclean. We have much of this, and doubtless it will soon have its own archbishop.

It is quite possible this refers to our three hopping heroes of the last hundred years, the liberators of thought from God by the unclean irrationalities which appeal to those who desire to be bound by them: namely, the outpourings of Marx, Darwin and Freud. This is quite a table of naturalism, in fact. Marx sought to gain genesis and meaning from the structure of things: but their structure did not create them, and this applies equally to his mental militia which studies, almost as if with Buddha, the navel of matter to see if its head can be found there, and meaning assigned to it. This has a certain fraternity.

Darwin tried to gain vital genesis and meaning from the flow of things, and projecting unconfirmed extensions: but their inter-relation did not create them.

Freud, a little more forward, sought to gain glints of human genesis or meaning, from the drive (and shuffle of things in the reedy reaches of psycho-somatic broad waters): but the drive did not create them.

Indeed, Jung combined drive and flow in his own way, reaching again from 'Nature', as he sought in 'Nature', the nullity for source which it possesses. He probed more factually then Freud into ... the screws and pulses of the thing, for the meaning/direction of the engine. But the pulses did not create the thing that pulses.

(See for all these things in more detail, SMR, Chs.2,3,4,10, esp.303ff., 750Bff.; and Index on the 3 names in view.)

Alas, in the syndrome so constant and consistent, the frantic engineer forgot the factory, the diagnostician of motor troubles forgot the plans, the sketches of machines in his sales talk, confusing drawings with construction, just as the accident analyst ignored the creation of what had the accident. The accident in the end is neither the design, the creation nor the law of life. It is rather the breach of it!

So do the frogs of Revelation leap, so well symbolised these or their like, hopping into the (mental) houses of men with their raucous and atrociously unintelligent croaking, as if to laugh at the pretensions of houses built in swamps.

The Free Fogs

Whether, then, in

1) biology,
2) psychology,
3) sociology,
4) politics or
5) physics,

one and the same result obtains as man peers into the 'profundities'.

There is nothing of genesis there. As to the ceaseless callow substitutes, each one doesn't work; it can't even be made to work. (Cf. SMR Chs.4, Sections 1-3, with Ch.7, pp. 611-631A and Ch. 5.)

On the other hand, in each of these categories there is an overwhelming attestation that verifies the Biblical statements, as has been exhibited in SMR continually and in considerable detail, and amplified in some respects in the present work.

Indeed, the categorical testimony of Genesis, competitively, is overpoweringly irrefutable, significantly testable, verifiable, applicable. That is, the acuity and accuracy of all verifiable components leaves organic evolutionism with no place as a serious contender, competitor, in terms of scientific method, or logic more generally. How much then depends on the 'g', whether it be as in Genesis, or merely genesis! - on the source, the substance of the power, the sufficient cause.

There is a way for each of these five fields in this area, that is right; none of them is self-creating or liable in itself for this result. Rules and principles, laws, personal, moral, political, sociological, physical apply. They must be kept in mind, in heart or in use, not applied artlessly or heartlessly: or else the thing doesn't work. Indeed, what they portend must be met; and at that meeting, what He wills must be found, and HE must be found. Otherwise it is rather like silly children, spoilt in many cases, playing without wisdom, with the father's equipment.

There is a way in the ultimates for each of these five fields that is explicatory, and without antinomy: and indeed, just as none of them is self-creating or available in itself for this result from itself and its world, so none is available for autonomous manipulating. Yet it is tried!

Autonomy?

It is like a baby in a womb, wanting for the sake of self-expression (or self-respect?) to smash out of it... Created by God in His image, we have as a race a natural desire for finding out and exercising. Yet as to proceeding to forget ourselves as if we were non-derivative, it is quite as foolish as is the custom of making ourselves central, and wondering what on earth (or beyond it, for that matter) possesses things, that they DO NOT WORK OUT!

	By these, we find explication of the aspects involved in this field, without reductionism, that sallow avoidance of issues which is more psychological than logical.
	We find no less the necessity of such elements for any understanding of the subject matter
	and hence,
	thirdly, validate that man is not insane in his imaginations of guilt, responsibility and shame, liberty and the capacity to cast thought freely, but a product of the God, without whom liberty is impossible, life is self-contradictory frustration, its parameters a pool of death.

	as if a cog were to aspire to detail the design, its purpose or the nature of design;
	as if an 'occurrence' were to define occurrence and its structure, origin, nature and character, abstracting from the scene of its setting like a lecturer taking sabbatical, to discourse objectively on what that setting is; or
	as if an illusory error-free world of material reality were to explain the character of probing hypothesis, and show why an opponent had committed error! in not following the desired monistic model, and thus must have existed in some way outside the system affirmed, even while allegedly within it (since matter cannot err, in a model of mere occurrence: occurrence does not err, it happens); or
	as if a performance were to evaluate the character of the principles which promote it, or in general, the merely involved could step outside its frame, and objectively evaluate its existence, or the relative could lay claim to the absolute when, by model hypothesis, it is not there:

	that wonder of a subject enabling man to experience direct, the self-demonstrating objective reality (cf. TMR Ch. 5, SMR Ch. 6),
	who also has become the self-revealing exhibit to man in his own terms:

	That is the Therapeutic Aspect (XV)
	of the Exhaustive Resolution Phase (IV),

	necessarily fail (cf. Causes),
	since they use what they attack, so that if successful, they must fail.