CHAPTER NINE

GOD'S LOVE IS AS REFRESHING
AS OCEANS,
WATERFALLS AND SOARING PEAKS
AND FAR MORE SO

 

THE LOVE CLEAR, CLEAN AND WONDERFUL,
NEITHER MAWKISH NOR GAWKISH,
NEITHER FORMALISTIC NOR FATUOUS
NEITHER FICKLE NOR TRANSIENT
BUT RICH, DEEP, PURE AND PERSISTENT
ETERNAL IN UNDERSTANDING, IN DURATION, IN BEAUTY:

THAT is the love of GOD!

A change of type-face! Horrendous, unthinkable, past bounds?

But so is the love of God in the other side of the spectrum, wonderful, past thought and conception.

This is NOT because it is incomprehensible through LACK, but through superabundance.
It is NOT through failure in coherence; but through the magnitude of its vast wonders, like a cave in which the labyrinths seem endless, a waterfall in which the thrusting cool depths have become visible to the eye, like a mountain which not content with reaching to heights over the earth, soars majestically in full fellowship with the heavens, adorned with the storms of grandeur, but stable still.

Is it because so many have abused this term, no less that that of 'truth', that so many are so seedy about using it ? Is it because of the hippies and the love-ins of cuddlesome aids and lust, where love is so real that it lasts until it hurts, and then vanishes like the sun behind the cloud ? Is it because perverted persons (as the Bible calls them) talk so much about it, and even act as if to traduce Romans 1 in their hurry, as if 'lust' were not applicable to them, when quite clearly 'forsaking the natural usage' is the generic, and lust is applicable to this failure generically ?
 
 

THE DISGUST THAT RELATES TO LUST

Is it disgust at the unthinkable presumption against the word of God when some things called 'churches' ignore II Timothy 1:10 and Leviticus 20:13 in its death penalties, along with II Timothy 3:16 and try to manufacture same gender marriages, procreatively null, abortions of the deity's design ?

Is it for this reason, or some other allied reasons, that so many fail to realise the depth and grandeur of the love of God ?

Is it rather because of the sentimental talk, in which pity is a substitute, and it moves you if it will; so that horrors of insensitivity are wrought by those who yet apply the name 'Christian' to themselves, becoming a source of revulsion to many ? Were not the Pharisees thus in Christ's day, and does not Amos excoriate just such abuse of the name of the Lord (Chs.3-4), as indeed does Jeremiah in 7:8-11 and Isaiah in 1,and 58-59 ? Is not even what is called a 'church' often found in which the house of prayer for all nations (but NOT all faiths!) becomes a travesty of merchandising (as Christ indicated in John 2:15-16). For that matter, tradition is often allied with cultural pollution, so that both doctrine and dealings relate to Christ in name only (Mark 7:7, Matthew 23:14ff.).

Is it then for THIS reason, or is it for all of these reasons, that so many have so little to say about the love of God, and as bad, so little to show of it!
 
 

THE GENERATION OF LOST LOVE AND FOUND LUST OF MIND AND HEART AND BODY

This is a generation of lost love and abounding lust (Matthew 24 sets the scenario as the last days, and 24:7-12 the 'love' situation within it!). It is one where 'love of many grows cold'! "And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many. And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall grow cold" - 24:11-12.

What of Freudianism^*1, that disaster area of all that is impure! Does not Paul put it succinctly: "To the pure, all things are pure: but to those who are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure; but even their mind and conscience is defiled" - Titus 1:15. We have dwelt often enough on the impossibility of anyone whose underlying 'unconscious' is so controlling and deep, so embracive and intrusive, to be able to find what is truth, in order to say it, whether as Freudianism or anything else. It is an delusive presupposition. It is self-disenabling. It is auto-invalidating. It is grounded where there is no place to found anything. However, that is not all. In the moral aspect, the foolish philosophy, wholly divorced from any science, would hold that in some unknown way, some presumed dynamic in some undiscernible interface of action, creates things so diverse as to be ludicrous in comparison, so opposite as to be an art-form in contrariety, so wholly unaccounted in content as to an abyss of omission: this is infantile in logic, the grand tour of a Europe after its destruction, in design.

Sex as Jung points out (SMR Ch.4), simply does not ACCOUNT for anything of the distant realms desired,  in any statable and verifiable, any substance of interface, any correlation of design, any productive agency of particular kind, to enable prediction or understanding. it is a false and fraudulent concept. It IS a major motive in many, as is food; it DOES lead many to do many things, as does gluttony; it IS undoubtedly a close preoccupation for many, as is money production and retention, or lavish displays of spending, for others. All this is true. It is a pathological centre, as well as a productive one; it is a source of ruin as much as the love of speed. It is as common as cancer in its distorted and gross abuses which destroys its contribution, like a thief cutting Raphael paintings out of the canvas in order to sell them. It IS a place to sell the soul, as are many other things.

The theoretical wand is waved, just as the ancient Greeks waved the wand of water or fire, air or atoms, change or stability, in odd seeming almost slap-stick reductionism, as if each would outdo the other in the aberration of the intellect, in seeking to consider its origin, or power.

In all this, however, old or new naturalism, the actual facility of the realms of imaginative creation is not attached. Only magic is available, for those who believe in it. Those not enamoured of myth, the attribution of consequences to inadequate or non-articulated causes, need something of the order of the product in the power of the productive agency, not a mere reference to energy. That is like making the sun the producer of plants: in fact it merely supplies some forms of energy for whatever is constructed to utilise it. It is the construction, not the mere fuel, which is in point; nor is reproductive capacity the same as mental fuel, in any case. Burning a fire may warm a house, but it does not built it. Heating metal does not construct a Jaguar. Engineering specificities and specialisation are needed for that; and engineering vision.

First, nothing is not something, with or without a future. Underived derivatives, nothing-created consequences, these are mere insolvencies of mind. Ground is always, and first, needed for ANY results. Second, something is not adequacy, you need articulation of specific power to achieve specialised results. Smuggling God IN by words, does not achieve His presence. Wordy theories lack the power to do. They are merely the arid aria of frustrated naturalism, sick at heart (cf. Repent or Perish Ch.7), unsound in mind, subdued in spirit, tame in thought, inaccurate in rendition, elaborating words without deeds, hopes without substance and complexities abounding in perplexities, without the slightest advent from the stage production, to the products themselves.

That is why they NEVER do, these God distancers, never do anything but glory where no glory is, and create nothing, but confusion of words, mists of mind, horror of heart, loss of integrity, the defilement of what they do not create, intellectual pesticides, which by mistake, have attacked not the pests but the crops themselves.

Thus this psychiatric theory  is doubly magical and artfully contrived, a slack theory^*2 for a deep and devious scenario, such as Freud in fact met. Small wonder Jung rejected it so categorically. How much of love has been wounded by its callow excavations, its bits of the mind that have no design, so that they should operate as mind, its reductionist fallacy, its specialist's preoccupation with his field, to the omission of what the farm is about.
 
 

THE SENTIMENTALITY WHICH RELATES TO THE BLIND CHRYSALIS OF CONTENT

It is not that sexuality is in some sense 'wrong'. The association which it enables is not without its fruit, children, not without its aura, love and without its purity, splendour of self-sacrifice and amazing endurance of devotion. It does not CREATE these things, any more than food creates muscle or speed spirit. It is ASSOCIATED in many cases. It is intimately associated in the NATURAL order of family, with its own provision, succour, tenderness, and the whole increasing environment of family and cohesion in all calamity, with jointness in all joy. It is a means of increasing the race, instituting the family, expressing devotion and tenderness where its fruits are cherished and the association relates to those for whom it is a symbol, not an idol.

Yet the exploitation of sex into a virtual religion, a sort of 'theoretical' author without pen or paper, a mute 'basket' which, when ignited, makes the world of action with its thrust or various other features, this is merely ONE of the many disorderly substitutes for a reasoned - let alone a just - concept of love. Thus marriages break up, as if there were no more than a common cold in the heart; and they are made as if there were no more than an appetite for this or that, personality company, gratification or whatever. The mutuality, which personality is capable of assuming, expressing and consummating in children, is all but forgotten.

What is it like ? The transport is the objective; not the means. Cars are the gods, not the distance medium. Techniques become religious exercises; but love ? In all such things, it  is not even a caricature. It is far worse than worshipping a chef, because you like his food. It is to worship the food and forget the chef altogether; and then choke, in countless instances.

What however of the mutuality of personality, the tenderness of family in the open book of the writing of God, who made the DNA productive, and the image a design ? (Cf. SMR Chs.2, 4.)

All this is nearly forgotten, or if not, it is sentimentalised into some kind of religion, in which the very excellence of the love is made a substitute for the awareness of God who made the ensemble; and then, in the artful confusion which is the highroad to loss, visited upon nothing is the thing called ... love. Nothing finds it - like everything else - overwhelming.

The necessities of logic however lead otherwise. Not from or to nothing is the creativity and the creation to be found or attributed; for without potential, past or future is 'nothing', on pain of being mere misuse of words, and that, it does not create ANYTHING, but confusion, which is rather less than a universe! What is adequate is the LEAST needed, and God alone meets the requirements, the logical requisitions of the creation, as a base (see SMR Chs. 1-3, A Spiritual Potpourri Chs. 1-9, That Magnificent Rock Chs. 1,8, Repent or Perish Ch.7).

These things are the clear answer to the confused, anti-scientific blather of Freudianism. The obsessive pre-occupation was merely a nightmare of reductionism, incoherent in theory, specialised in pathology.

However let us trace out the matter of what is divine revelation in this area, and what does meet the requirements of reason ,as demonstrated (see reference above), so often on this site.  It is with this reality that we must now concern ourselves, in applied Apologetics, so that we may consider the restitution of what is holy, lovely and virtuous, honourable, sound and true, consider the various empirical substitutes and extend horizons to an adequate perspective to cover all the manifestations in a way agreeable to all the evidence.

Love ? It was His and in His creation He provided for it; not only means for its expression, but something to express. Not to nothing He did not send this card, His card. But this which is past means, and instrumentalities, this love, it has plenty of tests.

The love of friend who in proud derision publicly castigates his fellow, for some real or imagined failing, and does not lovingly take him aside and correct what is to be preserved, how is that love at all ? The love which forsakes the wife of years, and the family of decades for the desires of some youthful lady, or man, how is that love ? how is it more than self-gratification ?

Be yourself! they say. WHY ? Is it nice ? Is it an artistic splendour ? Is it some wonderful
creation ? or is it a stomach on wheels, a lust on a trolley ? a self-aggrandisement in self-display ?

Is a 'self' then some sort of a god ? Is it fire warming ? Is its heart exemplary ? There are many things on this earth, but what is glorious about a 'self' ? Once again, however, it is merely an abuse of a closely allied, but wholly different reality. There IS indeed something of value and significance about a 'self' when it is rightfully conceived. When it is not a site for self-display, self-satisfaction, smug self-assurance (called self-esteem, one of the worst things on this earth, along with self-trust and the other clatter of words which is self-hypnotised, in the divinities of the soul which nevertheless dies into judgment in its time) , then where is its role ? Is a 'self' to be admired because it has no morals ? or because its 'morals' are merely enlightened exaltation of self ? or because its principles relate to self-advancement, self-satisfaction, self-development or other self-centred clatters and clutters, the whole point of which is decidedly irrational, for in all this universe what is assuredly NOT the centre, is the 'self'! It is delusion, illusion and artful parody of reality.

It is just one more philosophy instead of love. There are plenty of them, these sectional substitutes, some amoral, some immoral, all irrational, all reductionist, none able to account for what the Bible calls 'love', or to institute it. Yet love ?  it is found in thousands, met in its overtones and songs in many who only distantly perceive it; found in willing sacrifice and service for spiritual realities which come from God, in heartiness of spirit and fervency of mutual concern, in the clean arena of the rule of the Lord, who is its coping stone, its symbol, and indeed, its donor.

LOVE ? It is distorted, misnamed, evacuated and then gloried in, like those who leave the mansions of peace for the tenements of hovels, and then call the latter mansions.
 
 

MISDIRECTED EXTREMES,
THAT RUN OFF THE EDGE OF THE LEDGE,
AND FALL ABYSMALLY

Some in theology go to both extremes of delusion, the equator of passion and the Artic of ice.
On the one hand, many there are who make the love of God so rarefied that it is impossible to see how in the kindness and love of God to MAN (Titus 2-3), He gave His Christ. Their God seems clothed about with something else. HOW He can be called LOVE as to HIS NAME (I John 4) is wholly unclear. HOW He can be said to desire that all should repent and come to the knowledge of the truth (I Tim. 2) is as clear as the smog of London in its thickest soup. IN an endeavour to make system (which in the 5 points of Calvin is undoubtedly sound), they then philosophise away, in straight defiant declension from the Bible, the love of God. IF He is omnipotent, say many, HOW is He loving in that broadest sense, when so many are not saved! This they ask. Hence they have a limited love. And then the love of God is narrowed into some human limited resource, or belittled dimension.  It is called theology. Wesley assailed Whitefield on the topic. Each had points.

The SYSTEM that God FOREKNOWS and CHOOSES His own without our aid is as right as Ephesians 2:1-10, Romans 9. The LOVE which IS PRESENT as He CHOOSES His people, before all time, IN CHRIST (Ephesians 1:4) is as clear as is Matthew 23:37 (see SMR Appendix B). The scope is as vast as shown in Colossians 1:19ff.. IT PLEASED the FATHER that in CHRIST should all FULNESS dwell. It is neither society secretary, political secretariat nor family planning provision: it is deity sending and deity sent as in Isaiah 48:16, John 8:58, Micah 5:1-3.

It pleased Him, we read, that this same SON, having made PEACE through the BLOOD of the CROSS should reconcile ALL THINGS to Himself, even in heaven or earth. THAT was HIS pleasure. Some who deem themselves theologians, as if to understand the divine desires and deliverances, do not seem to realise that it is unsound to reject the STATEMENT of GOD! 'Equal with God', they yet die like men, unable to do what the One who is had to do, in His fulfilment of the stringent conditions which illustrated His deity, and actualised the divine plan (cf. Joyful Jottings 7-11).
 

• On the other side, there are those who would make the love a poor, miserable thing disadorning the deity, frustrated and feeble: and it is such a concept as this which would appear to drive some to their misconception which would demean the broad grandeur of the scope of His love, the majesty inseparability of the love of God from His very nature (I John 4:7). The love of God ? It is profound, it is illimitable ... What does Paul in fact say ? THIS: it is his desire that those at Ephesus, as people of God, should be such that

 

• "Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saint what is the breadth and length, and depth and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passes knowledge, that you might be filled with all the fulness of God."

 

• It is in this context that the power of God is present, as shown in what immediately follows:

 

• "Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according tot he power that works in ;us, to Him be glory in he church by Christ Jesus through all generations of the ages" - Ephesians 3:21.

 

THE LOVE OF GOD ITSELF

The love of God, it is not narrow, constricted into unseeing sovereignty; but it is GOD HIMSELF who is sovereign, always is, always was, always will be, is always love, does all in love, even when amputation is the only remedy (cf. Mark 8:42-49). Nor is it narrowed in quality, like some poor perturbed young man, listless in his loneliness, aborted in his desire, infatuated with his object of desire, who jilts him. We shall see that below.

It is judicious, it is enduring, it is profound; but when it has done all to the banks of the rivers, if the walls of the stream are persistently, resistantly, insistently asphaltous, then they do not receive the waters of life. It is the Lord who knows these things, who foreknows His own, who penetrates the thickest darkness, finds the crevice in the crevasse walls, who understands and restrains, who proceeds and engulfs, who is never to fail, whose residues are lost not through the lack of the superabundance of the waters of the stream, but for the emptiness that follows the wake of  His own determination.

it is then that the river bank is lost, becomes marshy wasteland. It will never be found. The love of God ? That is its store: that deep past all human knowledge, GOD KNOWS. HE FOREKNOWS. He predestines, but NEVER through lack of love, nor through its militant invasion (cf. Matthew 11:12 where Christ referred to the useless violence of Herod in beheading John the Baptist, gaining merely air). That is not the way with love. Nor is sickness the way with health. While we are sick in sin, He finds! When found, we respond.

The love of God  is neither poor and unadorned, nor is it sovereignly disdainful or uninterested, as some put it, like a man's affection, who moving through an orphanage, selects some because His heart is set on them, and simply passes over the others, saying, These, they have no claim on Me, and I have no heart for them ( II Timothy 2:1ff., Ezekiel 33:11, Matthew 23:37, Appendix B of SMR, Predestination and Freewill).

It is NOT SO. It is hard to see what could be further from what the Bible says on love. After denouncing the persistent, chronic evils of Moab, not even Jewish in the old Covenant days, this is what the Lord says as He announces calamity for that people, following their refractory recalcitrance from all good:
 

• "Therefore my heart shall wail like flutes for Moab,

And like flutes my heart shall wail
For the men of Kir Heres" - Jeremiah 48:36.

Again, of the Jews, we read this:
 

• "I have surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself:

 

• 'You have chastised me, and I was chastised.

Like an untrained bull;
Restore me, and I will return
For you are the Lord my God.
Surely, after my turning, I repented;
And after I was instructed, I struck myself on the thigh;
I was ashamed, yes, even humiliated,
Because I bore the reproach of my youth.'

"Is Ephraim my dear son ?
Is he a pleasant child ?
For though I spoke against him,
I do earnestly remember him still;
Therefore my heart yearns for him;
I will surely have mercy on him, says the Lord."

This  - Jeremiah 31:18-20. And what PRECEDES this passage ? This:

"Refrain your voice from weeping,
And your eyes from tears;
For your work shall be rewarded," says the Lord,
"And they shall come back from the land of the enemy.
There is hope in your future," says the Lord,
"That your children shall come back to their own border."

Yes, and they did, not once (Isaiah 11:10), but twice and they do so NOW!

The love of God is not restrained; it is NOT to be restricted as poor Jonah in his bout of rebelliousness, was to find (Jonah 3). . The LORD IS concerned, DOES care; but neither is judgment is not forfeit because of love, nor is love forfeit because of judgment. Does not the LORD SEEK! (cf. Ezekiel 18), and is he not most willing and ready in the strength of purity!

Love is patient and kind (I Cor. 13); but it also rejoices in the truth (I Cor. 13). It does not hold JUDGMENT TO RANSOM, but the beautiful design which is expressed from the heart and mind of the Saviour, our God, the Lord Jesus Christ, Father Son and Spirit, the Almighty,  it is this: that HE PAID for all who COME, and HE INVITES ALL to come, and HE makes the REJECTION of this call, the criterion of damnation. THAT is what counts IN THE END (John 3:19, 36). There is no room for unrealism. There is not even any room for autonomy. We do not CHOOSE GOD, and HE SAYS SO (John 15). WE ARE CHOSEN, but chosen by the Lord who cried of Jerusalem, that it had now KNOWN HE DAY OF ITS VISITATION (Luke 19:42)...

• "If you had known, even you, especially in this your day, the things that belong for your peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes."

 

And what preceded THAT! This:

• "Now as He drew near, He saw the city and wept over it..."

Now we have often looked at these themes (as in SMR Appendix B, The Kingdom of Heaven
Ch. 4) and it is not our desire to repeat. It is rather to see this here as ONE ASPECT of the whole matter of the LOVE OF GOD.

It is not only the selection of the damned, whose hell might be in heaven, were they there, as C.S. Lewis so brilliantly indicates in his Great Divorce; of those who, without being divorced from being in the image of God, are yet foreknown to God, just as are those who are His.

It is also the realisation of the wonder of God, where in chasteness of heart and holiness of concern, He finds place. As to that, the end of the matter as the beginning indeed lies in His sovereign will; but WHAT A WILL is that, which is exhibited with definitive precision in Christ Jesus the Lord, who ... wept for Jerusalem, AFTER doing all, in power and purity, in criteria and demonstration, fulfilling the words of the prophets and meeting the needs of the people: and THEN was rejected by the empty artifices of men, then, as indeed now!

He does not mutilate reality; but interprets it; nor is the steering wheel in our hands, for we but respond; but we DO respond and the response, though conditioned on the deliverance of the Lord by which alone are our eyes opened, yet it is a deliverance which relates to a predestination which is wrought in CHRIST, who being God manifest, was expressive here, as there, of the love of God, who would have gathered His chicks under His wing .. but "you would not".

HOW He knows, it is His business. That is where so many go wrong on the sloppy side, on the weak and unrealistic side, making a God of clay. Possibilities have been explored simply to show the coherence and indeed, perfection of the truth in our Christian apologetics (Predestination and Freewill). THAT He so yearns over us, it is HIS STATEMENT. THAT He cleans the mess in justice and judgment where mercy is rejected - that too is His word. Patients refusing rescue from a bombed hospital can not justly condemn the bombs for their plight, but their own hearts. That His knowledge is so precise that NONE IS LOST (John 13:1, Ephesians 1:4) is the beauty of it. There is precisely NO ROOM for chance!

GOD IS NOT trying to find justification for rejecting those He does not happen to want. He is STATEDLY seeking to the uttermost for those who may be found, even to the highways and byways. There is a WHOLLY unaristocratic approach form the Lord, and what more shows it than His OWN COMING in a poor situation, like the root out of a dry ground (Isaiah 53).

Man is always trying to glorify something, whether sex, food, vacation resorts, football clubs, or soccer in that giant moaning which sounds like a disorderly revivalist meeting. It is for man, a form of madness to do it, when in fact it reaches that religious level. One is almost bound to say this also: man in sin, in some way, is bound to do it, even if the glory is to repose in that slight and slippery thing, that product, his own self.

As to man, his heart is not at rest without glory. Sometimes he gives it to lust, sometimes to a sentimentalised version of love, which is as deep as a puddle; sometimes to the dismissal of it, as with Hitler and the Marxists, who both HAVE to glorify something, however puny, such as the Aryan race, or the proletariat (in fact, as revelations from Lenin make only too clear, far from realistically), the embattled 'people', who reflect the glory in Communism all too quickly, back to the leaders,  the aristocracy of the now unimpeded State swallowing horror in greedy gulps and unjust presumption, feckless arrogance, as a few men play God over the ... wretched rest.

There is NO NEED to glorify some puny thing if you glorify God.

God, He IS LOVE (I John 4:7-8), a love which shows restraint, which does not defile, which is not defiled, which knows its mark, which is patient, which in the end, in truth and righteousness, accomplishes what it desires (Psalm 89:13-14), though hard the losses (Philippians 2:1-10), and deep the compassion. It does not make righteousness abdicate in order to indulge itself; nor does justice and judgment make love abdicate in order to fulfil their own lairs. It is all one: in righteousness God has visited SIN UPON HIMSELF in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ (II Cor. 5:19-21, I Peter 2:22, 3:18). In love He has found those who are His, not defiling their 'image of God' status, in the process, but rather restoring it (Colossians 3:10,  Ephesians 4:23-24). In grace He has given eternal life to His own (Romans 6:23, John 10).

In reality, His is delight at the winning of the lost, so far that the angels rejoice in heaven MORE at one sinner who repents than over 99 who WON'T and DON'T. HE HAS DONE IT. YOU can neither come nor go of yourself. Your SELF is NOT sacred. HIS LOVE IS sacred. It is in LOVE that He brings you home, who are His. It is in its PURITY that He does not - as if in some Moslem multimarriage discrimination against the integrity of women, with sealing and crimping restrictions - force the issue, using violence where faith belongs.

Love does not realise itself by FORCE. Even we humans know that. Yet it DOES realise its inner depths, and in Dickens' The Tale of Two Cities, you see that, when Carton, the drunken but brilliant lawyer, gives his life so that the woman he deeply cherishes, and delights in, might have the love of the man whom she loves. LOVE IS NOT POSSESSIVE. It is kind; it does not SEEKS ITS OWN. It is not great on its rights. RIGHT however is the very oxygen of its air. It rejoices in the truth (I Cor. 13).

Righteousness like fresh air from the ocean, blows on its way. It has no place or companionship with wrong, no recourse to violence for the achievement of its love. Judgment may punish; love seeks redress. Where there is no room for redress, it is NOT that love has grown cold, when it is the love of God; it is that "there was no remedy" as II Chronicles 36:16 has it. The tendernesses, the protestations, the exhortations, the commendations, the understandings, the opportunities, they are all past. You see that in Hosea 12:10:

• "I have also spoken by the prophets,

And have multiplied visions;
I have given symbols through the witness of the prophets."
 

God has not spared in the techniques of approach, the messages and the means. Look at Ezekiel's first chapters, and consider the contortions made in the name of the Lord, by the longsuffering prophet, as he used his own body as a means of showing the people the depth of their depravity, if by any means they might repent, so that by all means they might understand. Look at Jeremiah as he appeals to the king, whose eyes would be put out in his depraved pride and folly, despite many opportunities offered:
 

"Hear and give ear:
Do not be proud,
For the LORD has spoken.
Give glory to the LORD our God
Before He causes darkness,
And before your feet stumble
On the dark mountains,
And while you are looking for light,
He turns it into the shadow of death
And makes it dense darkness.

"But if you will not hear it,
My soul will weep in secret for your pride;
My eyes will weep bitterly
And run down with tears,
Because the LORD's flock has been taken captive.
Say to the king and to the queen mother,
"Humble yourselves;
Sit down,
For your rule shall collapse,
the crown of your glory."

 Indeed, in Jeremiah 9:1-2 we read this:

• "Oh, that my head were waters,

And my eyes a fountain of tears,
That I might weep day and night
For the slain of the daughter of my people!
Oh that I had in the wilderness
A lodging place for wayfaring men;
That I might leave my people
and go from them!
They are all adulterers,
An assembly of treacherous men."

 

 

Even as late as in Jeremiah 17:19ff., the Lord is offering them a simple way to show their sincerity and integrity, to come to Him, to be utterly delivered, for even then He would act to deliver! (cf. Ezekiel 33:11). Yet in Jeremiah 17:1ff. you see one of the greatest indictments of human sin possible to make! There is love and justice, there is reticence and patience, there is desire and tenderness, there is the onset of the judgment to come, for righteousness is not forfeit; but tenderer than a mother (cf. Isaiah 66:12-13, 40:1ff.), there is the preliminary.

How men love to ignore, to debase, to misplace, to limit, to sentimentalise and demean the love of God. But it is  NONE of these things! It is not this human philosophic intrusion as ONE sort of theology, or THAT other. One lacks system, which the Bible displays; the other lacks substance, which it attests. No! not these, though each speaks something.

It is not this. It is WHAT THE BIBLE TEACHES, and this is what it says. It is sown in spirit, wrought in flesh; it is made in man by God, it is spent by man for God. Incarnate as Jesus the Christ (I Timothy 3:16, Philippians 2), God has exemplified it, shown its words, its practice, unpolluted, pure, precise, deep and always ready for good.

Are you au fait with the love of God, reader ? Do you LOVE God ? There is nothing to COMPARE, and indeed, if you do not love God, you despise your own life, for it is the coin of its commerce, the depth of its soul, the ground of its continuance, the cord of inter-relation to the Lord, the way to peace; and it is a peace which LOVE FOUND which is available for you, and if you are HIS, which is YOURS NOW! (John 3:15-19). He did not COME to judge the world, but that the world through Him might be saved! He did not send some long distance missile of love: HE CAME (John 8:42, 55ff., 18:37, I John 4:9-10, , 5:13, 4:14).
 
 

THE REFRESHING RESPONSE

That ? It is refreshing. It is real, active, honourable, serviceable, alert, skilled and willing to take burdens, at His choice, when we come to receive the actions He has chosen. It is His, sovereign, but it is to be taken, in repentance. There is no other way.
It is like rain.

"He sends the springs into the valleys,
Which flow among the hills.
They give drink to every beast of the field
The wild donkeys quench their thirst.
By them the birds of the heavens have their habitation;
They sing among the branches.
He waters the hills from His upper chambers;
The earth is satisfied with the fruit of your works" -  Psalm 105:10-13.

Or again: "The river of God is full of water;
You provide their grain,
For so you have prepared it.
You water its ridges abundantly,
You settle its furrows;
You make it soft with showers,
You bless it growth" - Psalm 65:9-10.

It is physical, it is spiritual, the one reflects, mirrors the other:
 

• "You, O God, sent a plentiful rain,

Whereby you confirmed your inheritance,
When it was weary.
Your congregation dwelt in it;
You, O God, provided from your goodness for the poor.

"The Lord gave the word;
Great was the company of those who proclaimed it…
Blessed be the Lord,
Who daily loads us with benefits,
The God of our salvation!
Our God is the God of salvation,
And to God the Lord belong the issuances from death" (from Psalm 68:9-20).

It reaches beyond death; it reaches into life. In life, it has its ways: and these ?

He publishes peace (Isaiah 52:7): THAT is his book title, found by love, written in mercy, agonised in production (Hebrews 5:7), actualised in presentation. It comes with peace.

This too is past understanding (Philippians 4:6ff.) just as the love is; and again, NOT because it has any elements of discord, but because, like truly great painting, music, scenery, it loses the soul in its very depths, heights and wonder, its perfection, its harmony, its integrity, its concord where it is received and .. because GOD HAS SHOWN IT INDELIBLY!
 

• "But when the kindness and the love of God our Saviour towards man appeared
• not by works of righteousness  which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour, that having been justified by His grace, we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life..." (Titus 2:11);
• and it is thus that, we are "looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for himself His own special people, zealous for good works" -Titus 2:13-14.
•  If you would look for yet more of the refreshing of the Lord, ponder Ezekiel 47, that masterpiece of instructive allegory, that divine challenge and balm, both near, both together. You will find it treated in Biblical Blessings Ch.5, and here in this allegory of Ezekiel,  the surging waters reach all but the swampy marshes, where fishers sit on the banks under the trees of abundance, watered by the Lord, where the streams come from the altar of the Temple, which of course is now in substance found in Jesus Christ, Himself the shadow of the Mighty Rock in a weary land (Isaiah 32; 4:6; John 15:26); and watch the waters in Ezekiel 47, where they come to the ankles, to the thighs, so that they require swimming, and consider the current of the constraints of the Lord (cf. Romans 8:8-14 and The Kingdom of Heaven Ch.10,  Part 1), and His blessings which make rich, in the midst of poverty (of spirit) and which make joyful in the midst of mourning (for the condition of the world), for as to His waters, just drink them and you'll assuredly never thirst again (John 4:14, Nehemiah 8:10, John 16:22, Galatians 5:22-24).
• Consider the will, its submission to service of THIS LORD, of this same Jesus (not another, with another Gospel, or another spirit - II Cor. 11), and looking for Him and His appearing (Titus 2:13, Hebrews 9:28, I John 3), as is meet and innate to His own, in whom is His seed ((I John 3:9), to Him  who cannot fail (Hebrews 12:1, 6:28-29, 7:26-28) because HE WILL NOT FAIL (I Thessalonians 5:23-24, Psalm 115), rejoice with a refreshing that is free and favoured with the presence of the One who is wonderful. It is He who is  the artist behind beauty, the manufacturer behind mind, the Spirit behind our spirits and the heart beyond the grave, who pierced it and laid to death, death (Hosea 13:14) by His own afflictions (Isaiah 53:1-6, 63:7-9, Hebrews 2).

 You know Him by faith; but when you know Him, this it is in its profound majesty, glorious splendour, magnificent tenderness and undimmable purity, that you know as the candour of His companionship. The love of God is most refreshing, for it is the expression of the Creator, who through the practical expression of love, the redemption, has brought to man the expression written not only in ink, or on stone, but in flesh, in blood, in resurrection, in power, in precision, in prophecy, in life. Life is His and He has plumbed it, even to the abysses of its misuse. To remain without Him, it is love death (Proverbs 8:35-36).
 
 

END-NOTES

*1 EXCURSION INTO PROGRAMMATIC PSYCHOLOGY
IN THE CASE OF FREUD

The matter of this philosophy is appalling and of the nature of comedy, the comic, the cartoon.

Apart from the earlier points made (and see SMR Ch.4), there is this incredible vagueness. WHAT is this THING in which abide the ego (the sublime testimony to the immature assertive or self-deluded personality), the super-ego (that abysmal cartoon of half-believed morality, which abides in the deeps of hypocrisy) and the id (that divesting of humanity of itself, in the interests of seeking pleasure, apart from the fact that pleasures are even categorised as good and bad, and this definition is applied in terms of analytical aspects other than that of pleasure - SMR pp. 372ff.) ? What is the interface between the big three and what it is that HAS them ? Doesn't reason matter ?

Freud appears simply to have cartooned the Viennese, and those who 'bought' it were either too far gone to realise, too impressionable with money buying interest to worry or too reductionist to care. It is almost as if Freud were saying: You poor, miserable, self-seeking, pleasure-loving, godless morass of morals of convenience, there is not a  just man among you, not a self-controlled one, except in the interests of society, in which place is so important. Nothing really matters to any of you but what advances your sick egotism, suave religiosity or pleasure seeking undercurrent, which in fact are a flood. Ah selfish nation, seedy substitutes for humanity, society driven moralists whose morals are the pit!

He could ALMOST have been a prophet, but he omitted something. What it was to whom he was talking. WHO are these BEINGS with BITS ? In WHAT do the bits LIVE ? CARS are a design with bits put together and to some extent co-ordinated and subjectible to control; and so with space vehicles, and pianos and pens and hands and feet and fingers. Without WHAT THEY ARE, the bits seem ridiculous, hence the meaning problem of bittists, if one may invent a new term for this sort of extravagant anti-rational blur. They find a problem with meaning (emptiness, you may recall was the next generation psychiatrist, Jung's great 'find' in the heart of 'modern man' as he 'searched' for a 'soul' - to employ the name of Jung's volume: Modern Man in Search of a Soul). Having swallowed the follies of Freud, many of them might indeed look for a soul.

The thing Freud omitted was ... but God is not a thing, rather the source of them, just as our minds are the source of ideas, and our spirits the source of will ... the Maker. When you do not KNOW that the bits are a car, and do not BELIEVE in factories or creation, then MEANING will indeed be a 'problem' as the Americans used to say, and now much of the world loves to say. PROBLEM is indeed the watchword of the dissidents from deity. The word fever proved very apt, so that many used it who did not belong with it!

In fact, of course, a little thought reveals that the THING in which the BITS inhere, is not least, a thinker, to whom philosophies like those of Freud come, seeking attention, declaring themselves as invention, appealing for place. The PERSON (for that is what the 'thing' is) then disposes her/his (that's different, isn't it!) thought about the offering of invention, and considers its good and bad features, its mockery, comedy, its asperity, its rebuke, its satisfaction to frustrated psychiatric work, or whatever may be the going concern of the mind.  IS this theory of Freud, Freud's mind might ask, satisfactory ? He might consider.

Then the perspectives of Freud in his private life will appear, the understandings or misunderstanding of his conscience, the whole array of rationalisations with which perhaps he lives (he is a man, and he says what men are, does he not ? it is necessary to put all this together!). Yes, it satisfies this rationalisation (called perhaps, approach...) and it meets that desire, that latent frustration, exasperation or sense of fun. Whatever it is, it appeals. It is settled into power.

It covers some cases, perhaps without distinguished attention to fine detail like WHO it is that is thinking, or HOW ANYONE'S THOUGHT could be CORRECT when it is ALL under the CONTROL of the unconscious (another trade term), foraging and making forays into consciousness without label, or even declaration of war.

So Freudianism arrives. But who or what is Freud, who or what is man that he is discussing with such disdain and such implicit ridicule ? Who is this clown, who is this acidulous, if you like,  Charlie Brown of Freud's making, set forth not in comics but in casuistry ? He has in this case, less than no appeal.

Man who makes such theories ? He is then a thinker, an evaluator, an assessor, a seat of consciousness in which a reviewing person SITS, making judgments with analysis, and desire, purpose and assessment. The term 'person' is used. It is normally taken to refer to that special ingredient and design called man (and some others, with not less than cardinal features that make man himself). In the judgments and overviews, the insights and the intuitions, this MAN, this PERSON is assessing all things. Hence reason is its watch-dog, observation is its eye, and review is its control-tower.

What is the PERSPECTIVE for review ?

What is the BASIS of assessment ?

It is not least, COHERENCE of the materials under the watch-tower of review, together with the meeting of the coherence with the purpose of the thinker and the facility the view which arises from creativity has, with all the indications which are presented to the mind.  It is SATISFACTION of the criteria which are in place. But what is the THING to be satisfied ? Truth ? or peace ? or self-esteem ? or vindictiveness ? or prestige ? or  justice ? with or without mercy ? and with or without truth ? or income and prestige in uneasy partnership ? or what ?

In other words, the abilities and facilities of Freud make the basis for his theory, which denies these to others. It is a self-contradiction. IF REALLY HE COULD see all these things, then ACTUALLY he would be subject to the same distortions which he posits for MAN AS SUCH, and hence could not conceivably make a true theory, truth being in receivership to the unconscious, the ego and the id, and any common companions of a more super kind, that afflict the poor besotted ego...

At the same time, Freud has been, like Hume, self-forgetful. He should have added that man is a person, and that in his experience many a man gave too much attention to selfish and hence irrational constructions of his understanding of the universe, and for that matter of his own life; and too many were merely seedy moralists whose substance was long gone, mere shadows of social mores; and that there was such a disposition to pleasure in the choice-patterns arising like statistics from his surveys of broken and crooked personalities coming his way, that he had to say it - it was to a vast degree, a society which, having met various standards thrust upon it, had no other idea than pleasure!

This then would be an assessment. To be able to be true, it would mean that a PERSON considered that this subjective, self-interested DISTORTION of truth was being made in all men, but this with just one exception: it could not happen in himself alone. This exception is as with Marx and Darwin, necessary for the 'preacher' to have access to the truth he needs in order to belabour his audience. That is rather ridiculous, since it lacks all evidence, as well as contradicts the generalisation itself so that it would simply become this: THIS is the way which a man who can see beyond the ego, the id and the super-ego sees things.

Then one acknowledges:

At last Mr Freud, you have acknowledged who you are, who it is that is doing all this speaking. So man exists, persons exist, and disease exists, which may or may not strike, and you are currently immune. However, if this is what MAN is, this piece of BITTISM (another new term), then HOW could you know that you are immune ? You cannot OPERATE as something which does not even exist.

If however bits are not the man, then the man is able to overview and review and construe and accept or reject the things which you assume, in your big three; and hence this is the design you missed out, the integrity you failed to note, and must now note, since you are implicitly assuming it as you act. Hence man is NOT this big three, but a thinking, analysing, willing, assessing, preference distributing being who is susceptible in Vienna to the sort of distortion you note. Whether your assumptions even of the nature of the disease are exaggerated, is quite unclear, since your theory MUST FIRST BE ASSUMED TO BE TRUE OF YOURSELF IF OF ANYONE, since you know so very much more about yourself than about any other person in the universe!

Certainly, one might continue,  you could err about yourself through the disease called rationalisation, but it would seem that your private life is in tatters, for if it were wholly other than your theory, you theory could not be made.

Hence you should repent of your sins and find the Maker of your PERSON and do business in getting a moral rectitude which is not self-serving, an appreciation of pleasure which is not obsessive-compulsive, and an array of purposes which do not cluster like grasshoppers, on the ground of your soul, reducing it like crops, to such a projection of importance as is at war with the reality of your actual significance.

BUT, he might reply,

I AM SIGNIFICANT. I could kill you if I were devious and sure enough of myself, and THEN where would your analysis of my analysis be ?

Still where it was, one might reply,

before the eye of that person-maker called God. Your significance arises from your Maker, and when you deny Him in practice, then you cannot find your significance, and joining the ranks of other sick souls, you first omit the fact you have one, then despise the image of it, making spiritual pneumonia normal and health non-existent, then ignore the maker of the image, which when healthy, has reason to know the truth which you defile with your self-contradictory affirmations about what is true, and the basis from which you are supposing truth could possibly come.

The significance of man, then, is merely a reflection of the generosity of his creator, who, putting mind, matter and spirit into a unity called person, with facility for action in a physical, mental and spiritual environment, is a masterpiece of design, the purpose of which is to find, know and glorify God.

Without acknowledging the necessary source of your existence, facilities and functionalities, coherent and integrated in an ambulatory, cogitative, morally susceptible design called a person, you are merely in a morass of meaningless bits of thought, which neither cohere nor could cohere, which throw about ideas without substance for a being without a matrix, which operates in such a way, that were it true, it would make of your theory the fiction and fantasy which it properly is.

So which is it ? YOU are sick, or your theory is wrong.

If it were right, you would have assumed what contradicts your theory, a facility it will not permit; and you would be acting  as something which has no existence, being merely bittistic, a series of pieces lying about without a being and a power which is in fact co-ordinate with what you DO!
In other words, to BE ABLE to be right, you would have to be wrong.

What madness is Freudianism; and its sexual fantasies are merely a symptom of its other disorders. In these, as Jung says, there exists no interface to render the foolishness of the obsession to become a scientifically testable position. HOW does sex become an opera ? HOW does sexuality become dying for one's country ? From sexuality come children, apt for  the delight and tenderness with which they are begotten; but in its disorders, contrary to design for family and children, for protection and tenderness, for physical expression to deep and underlying love, there can be almost any abuse of life you wish. Sex is a pathway to (biological) life, and as such it is presented to man with the potential for what LIFE is. IF THIS is denied wilfully, then life being bitter, or self-acclaiming, or hostilely selfish, you readily get sexuality in these traumatic expressions of what the underlying spirit has become, depending on the general condition of social morality, which tend to present barriers, to brake them or to accelerate the kinesis.

This is merely a catalyst or an impediment, however. If the damage to the PERSON is there, then the results in this dimension, as in others, will arrive; and if the stream of life meanders around islands of silt, then the course varies, but the direction is the same.

In other words, life begets sexuality, and sexuality does not beget life. It does not create the cycle and the reality, but is rather a reproductive proclivity to replace life in its infant formats.

It is one facet, one function, and LIKE ALL FUNCTIONS, in a person it is susceptible to the usage which corresponds with the overview, the perspective, the values, the morals, the approach to the maker of this exquisite piece of intelligent design, called man. Where myth is believed - attribution of effects to inadequate causes, miasma is readily the atmosphere of the soul (cf. SMR Ch.3, pp. 255ff., 378ff.). In some cases of spiritual pathology, so vast is the abuse of religion, so cynical the approach to God, which may even be aggravated by a measure of formalistic or ritualistic religion, that the whole person has become a festering sore, and as with spastics, responses come out with suddenness and without grace. In their case, however, the sickness is physical, not implicating the soul; while in this, it is spiritual, abusing the potential.

So has sickness become for some, even since Jung's exposure of Freud's anti-scientific moralisings dressed in immorality, a yardstick and measure of life. In the leprosarium of spirit which pre-occupies or obsesses, leprosy is life, and life is denied. It is not very bright, this business of making of man a disease which therefore makes the author of the theory a case of mental disease, incapacitated from truth and actuality by the disease, which however he does not call a disease, so making the thing pseudo-objective; but when its nature is considered, then the universality of the assumption makes the sick author of the theory (as he then necessarily is, or if you prefer, the puppet of his own philosophy) - an author of sickness in words, of puppetry in ideas, and so of no slightest value, except to a student of diseases of the spirit, as an example of what can happen.

It is small wonder as shown in SMR Ch.4, that the Freudian methods have become considered too expensive, that reviews have found the results pitiable. Being told that you should be as sick as you please does not heal. What does heal is a healthy regard towards the maker of the integrity of mind which can think ANYTHING correctly, which is not the prerogative of bittistic meaningless atoms and fragments of being, which collect together at times in things called humans. IN a relativistic world,  NOTHING is truth. Hence, no one sick with this sinful philosophy, COULD know the truth, and hence it COULD not be the case that this utterance about the world COULD be true. Truth requires both the ABSOLUTE truth to exist, and ACCESS to it in such a way that one is NO LONGER IN CONTROL of it, but a subject under it, able to be dealt with as by a Maker with His object, in this case a subject, called man. This the Bible affirms (Romans 1:18ff., Ephesians 4:17ff., Jeremiah 17:9, 2:13, Isaiah 59, John 14:6, 8:43ff., 31-36, I John 1:1-4),  and logic requires. It has been our intention here to show that in addition to this generic failure in all reductionist philosophy, together with its failure to account for facts without distortion, and with justice and conscientious regard to the empirical actualities which work and make themselves seen, there is a third.

The third ? It is that the being is lost, that calls itself man, in this case.

It is not only lost in the sense that without God, it is subject to judgment and not susceptible to truth. It is lost also in the sense that in its own theorising,  it is NOT THERE; it has in its own perspective, left no room for WHAT IT, ITSELF, IS. It has lost itself in the abundance of words, in the multiplicity of cynicism, in the pit of scepticism without reason, and has even lost reason, and that systematically (cf. SMR Ch.3, pp. 255ff., 378ff., 262ff, 299ff., 100-101, 934ff.). HOW BROAD is the LOSTNESS of man when he first loses the very concept of what he is, then loses his soul in the lostness of his mind, and his future in the lostness of his denials, which denying himself so much as existence, finds in the end, what ? He finds the destiny of denial.

Hell ? it is like hell. On the way, it is delusive; on arrival, it is conclusive. Let us consider the perspective of this disease with a view to the objective reality (SMR Chs.1-3,10 expose it).
What is the syndrome, the classic conspectus of symptoms which declare the disease ?
 

·       1. The being denies its own existence.

·       2. Sickness is made a reason defiling assumption, and called health.

·       3. The Maker is made a product of the mind which is sick, and cannot know the truth, so that its denial of the Maker could not even possibly be true. It is however a datum in the life of the object (called man) that such an approach is frequently made, and often appears in this disease..

·       4. The being opts for various debased and disgusting self-centred irrationalities as the code of its life, by assuming this is the nature of man. If it is, one thing is sure, it IS THE RULING PASSION of the life which says so, or a close enough parallel - assuming the absence of ruling insanity or crass delusion - to it.

·       5. The being exhorts others to be like this, not directly, but implicitly, by the extraordinary seeming device of universalising this sickness, thrusting it on all men, and so making it NORMAL to be like that. It is a sort of academic sermon, deficient from the first, in academic method, but not in this, that it is anti-missionary, and actively missioning.

·       6. Thus we have a self-debasing, proclamatory preacher of unrighteousness, reductionism and irrationality, dressed in the guise of a physician, or equipped from such a source, or an academic variant. The disease of course spreads like contagion, common in universities, and victims can be the butt of the jab of this anti-intellectualist needle.

·       7. This sort of spiritual sickness has a place in the destiny role. Where is it ? What is the station to be occupied by an irrationalist, where reason CANNOT (by definition) COME ? where righteousness DOES NOT EXIST ? where people are the butts of cynical PREACHING, leading them astray from reality ?

·       We are accustomed to the word hell. But what is it ? A site, a spiritual station, subjected to just judgment, in which depravity of mind, heart, spirit and soul is given its place. It is not forced to be or do otherwise. It achieves the distinction of carving out a career where it belongs. This is where the disease, if not cured, ends: this is the terminus ad quem.

Like tired, exhausted bombers returning at night from Europe, limping with broken, tattered wings, oil spurting from their dying engines, tails awry, the generation of the lost seeks its eternal loss, spattering on the beaches. In this case, as in some of those, the pilots can live on, if you call it life, crippled with their crippled planes, deprived with the depredations of the flight. It is sad, inexhaustibly sad. It is just, unquestionably just. It is simple placement as at a job interview, where you are pointing.

Eternity for the lost is emphatically by Christ revealed as very different from NO PLACE. Time in this degradation has some sort of existence. Specialists in hell are welcome to investigate it. It is a very hurtful thing, and an evil. Torment of heart and spirit and conscience burn like fire. Truth is not suppressible in judgment, which is according to truth (Romans 2:1ff.).

Here however is that splendid light which encourages, which refreshes! Predestination ensures that NO ONE IS LOST who does not there belong (Ephesians 1:4 with 1:11, I Timothy 2:1-3, John 15:21-23). It is NOT the case that God is eager to have such destinies wing their evil way in justice into recalcitrant souls, awash in the Channel of dissidence, not from society but from the very Spirit who is God. HE IS EAGER (Ezekiel 33:11) to find (I Timothy 2) and CAME to earth in order to find (Mattheew 18:11), and His church is left to find, and His Spirit is able to find, and His Gospel is an open door from the beach, where the shattered vehicle of life is awash, and in this door in the surrounding cliff (Galatians 3:1-13, Psalm 118:19-24, John 10:9,27-28), is an elevator, which lifts to the top  of the cliff, where the gentle breezes blow, and to the flowers of the garden of Kent, where the sheep are. The door is Christ, the elevator is the power of God to translate us into the kingdom of His dear Son (Colossians 1:13).

To FAIL TO ENTER is an act of the will. TO ENTER is an act of divine grace. IF YOU WANT IT, thank God for moving your heart so to do, for it is His attitudinal wonder that He seeks the lost; and get in and on, up the elevator to the garden of God, where HE is gardener, and His blooms have fragrance (II Corinthians 1:9ff., 2:16ff.). Then WALK in the Spirit which is His (Galatians 5:16). The sun of righteousness shines overhead (Malachi 4:2), when the spirit of man is awakened to SEE what is there! Blindness is a thing of the past (II Cor.4:3-6, Colossians 3:10). The kingdom of heaven, hitherto not so much as SEEN, is now the reality in which one walks, like a blind man, revisited with sight (John 3:3).

Then see John 3:15-16. "Verily, I tell you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life." The serpent was pierced, the serpent that killed, raised up in symbol of death and destruction to its evil powers; and so Christ was raised up in triumphant exhibition of the salvation of God, bearing in Himself, the just for the unjust, the judgment due to sin, for everyone who believes (John 18,33-36). But WHY should He bother ? It is simple: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life."

It is LOVE which is the forgotten element, not mere sentimentality, not mere self-satisfying affection, based on desire for the private enterprises or fulfilment of the soul, but love from a pure heart, with desire for that which is good, and as personal as the intimacies, which the Creator MADE, undoubtedly need. It is the debasement of love, first in the life and then in the mind, or in the soul, which makes the heart distant, like those who have long lived in the incredibly arid, and acrid smog of a steel mill, who find it hard even to imagine ... pure, fresh air!

But does He not long to condemn! Far from it, as far as earth from heaven, and further yet, as far as the cross of condemnation from the heaven of felicity (John 3:17). It was not for THAT purpose that He came, though that result will assuredly come if the mediation of mercy is neglected (John 3:19). NO! He will condemn, when the destinies accrue and all is over, if He must; and there is no other gospel to which to appeal (Acts 4:11-12);  for He is the God of truth. But ...

"WHO is a God like You,
Pardoning iniquity,
And passing over the transgression of the remnant of His heritage ?
He does not retain His anger for ever,
Because He delights in mercy.
He will again have compassion on us,
And will subdue our iniquities.

"You will cast all our sins
Into the depth of the sea" (Micah 7:18-19).
 
 
 

*2

THE REALITY OF THE REFRESHING
SOARS ABOVE THE FAILURES
OF THE REDUCTIONISTS

Slack indeed is the theory, but empirically, there is not nothing to notice in this ebullient production.

What Freud DID notice was the depth and deviousness of departures from the actual facts. He also illustrated this phenomenon in ANOTHER WAY in the very logical warp in the theory itself!

What, without metaphysical muddle and spiritual blindness, he should have said at that level was simply this: that man has a morally sensitive, intellectually capable, truth resisting  entity (normally called his spirit) which can destroy his life (or soul), and that this investment of divine creativity, the best design object available for inspection after thousands of years of man's life on earth, set in a bodily format of like wonder, is at odds with that Maker, his own construction, and hence sick.

Put differently it is simply what was known from the Bible for thousands of years: Man at heart is desperately sick and that heart is deceitful above all things (Jeremiah 17:9). Freud's presentation was itself so warped in construction logically, so obsessively limited in its scope (understandable but not as theory, permissible) and so guilty of omission ( the subject of all this in its integral capacity) that it was a magnificent illustration of the inundation of theorist in constraints far more profound that those he had noticed, constraints not merely to misuse the equipment in ONE way (which preoccupied him) but in MANY OTHERS as well, and in so doing not merely to insult his own destiny (and aid its dire, mortal character) but his Maker.

Jung, the marvellous corrector to Freud, equally famous, was one who pointed out the scientifically absurd character of Freud's lack of articulation for his obsessive sex thrust, in its imagined pageant of creativities, stressed life. Naturally Jung was keen on 'integration of the personality' which was an improvement on bittism as in Freud, his predecessor; but WHAT the thing was to be integrated INTO, and WHY it should be integrable, and indeed, HOW this could be achieved, with the AUTHORITY he deemed necessary, arbitrarily divorced from the Creator whose power has it in hand, these were unanswered questions... Lacking cohesion, his theories lacked practical force likewise, because of this (cf. SMR Ch.4 which gives detail on the topic, and its surrounds). Ensconced in enigma, he ramified, but the results are a perplexity, as with a doctor who is not really quite sure at all what  FEET should look like, when he is seeking to reconstruct a crushed foot.

Jung too erred profoundly, in logic, with an erratic life force pouring forth from nowhere in particular, with enormous complexities and strategies of design, the normal myth complex (SMR pp. 252I); and likewise did notice something. It was not some libido inundated in the floods of experience that looked for some future path of action (personifications cannot look), with dreams attendant like suris to point the way, or note the problem through lack of it: for the libido is another name for life, and the life is not the product of sores but of source, known as God the Creator. That is why it has character as well as pollution.

The sores, however, which come to disadorn it, are called sin, which in its generic God-separating form of rebellion, IS indeed an intrusion into the history of the race, the category of our design, and can indeed lend some of its polluting powers from generation to generation in specifics, as well as God-separated generalities (Exodus 20 makes that very clear). Dreams however are as broad as life and can be from the heights of God or the squalor of the devil. Phantoms of the mind, or messages from God (Genesis and Daniel are fraught with them), they can be symptoms or resources.

What Jung could better have said, therefore,  is what in essence was long said:

·       Man is a sinner with multiple effects of that sin, leading to emptiness of depth, dryness of heart, impotence of seeking, graphic art displays of desire and understanding in dreams, in its hopes and frustration. One result is uncertainty of end - prone to produce extreme or foolish actions, of aim, and hence of method; or dulness of heart because of perennial frustration of mind and understanding.

·       That life needs [as Jung acknowledged in his OWN confessed impotence for the task] authority, AND indeed truth, direction and resource ADEQUATE to its condition, position and capacities. You need the design and hence the designer to remedy authoritatively and justly the condition. It is not just authority, merely that, but just authority, with informed propriety,  knowledge and design specifications of spirit, which are the issue, in questions of the mind and the spirit. Neither obsessive preoccupation nor vague generalities meet these criteria; and both these distempers in psychiatric approach result from ignorance of WHAT it is that is being treated, Freud omitting it and Jung defacing it, with predictable results. Life is in fact, even at the physical level, ANYTHING BUT VAGUE (SMR Ch.1 pp. 140ff., Ch.2, pp. 348ff.).

• This life in its FULNESS is available however, and should not be sought merely in some therapeutic minimum of authority as such [hence Jung's problem since he could find no authority apt for the necessary position, and as physician was confessedly inadequate, and would be a virtual impostor for that task], but in truth.
• That truth has always been available and it is a REDEMPTIVE truth,  a PRACTICAL truth and an AVAILABLE truth which should not be confused with power brokers in the ecclesiastical realm, but found in the Christ who did the dying for sin, the resurrection for realisation of integrity and reassurance of actual power and deity, according to His available word, the Bible. It is HE who is the divine therapist, trust in whom AVOIDS the PSYCHIATRIC problem which so pained Jung in that it is JUST, DUE and FUNCTIONAL to have HIS authority in the re-creation of the marred parcel called the human soul. His works fill the world, and it is practically and empirically HE who is
• the psychiatrist of millenia, prodigiously successful,
• the therapist of centuries, triumphant in reconstructions,
• the doctor who COULD both BE and DO what was needed, which WAS needed, effectual in standing,
• precisely because He is the craftsperson who CREATED the fouled up spirit of man.
• If, He indicated, people did not believe that He was in the Father, and the Father in Him, then  "believe Me for the sake of the works themselves" - and these, they were prodigious in number and in kind (cf. Matthew 4:23-4, 9:32-35, 11:5, Luke 4:40, cf. SMR pp. 339, 347), just as they still are.

Thus Freud was obsessively fixed on ONE sin area, and Jung obsessively vague in the life arena, and each fell into metaphysical and religious superficiality which made of their interesting empirical discoveries (which paralleled Biblical truth at THAT level in some of their substance, when freed from presuppositional confusion), a network of confusion. Stripped bare, their empirical observations confirmed Biblical truth, which preceded both sets of contributions by thousands of years. Thus does the 'wrath' of man serve God; for indeed, it is sad but real, that the disturbance of spirit which WILL not find God burns like anger, and its intemperate exclusion of God is like the anger, with or without éclat,  of a spirited but misdirected child.

The presence of such proper authority, divorced from the lusts of sin, both ecclesiastical, where it is often misused in illusion or even delusion, and personal, in the Person free from sin, holy, harmless, undefiled, higher than the heavens is so refreshing that even the heights of rocky cliffs, bespattered with free-flung spray from the vast limits of the ocean's grandeurs, cannot compete. Its free availability is greater than the vast empyrean of space, stretching with that uncaring magnificence which defies minuteness; and the refreshing is not only to the mind in its survey of this comprehensive marvel of astute and acute brilliance, but in the presence of Him who not only for the sick in mind, but for the lively, is the Prince of life (Hebrews 7:26ff., 1:1-3, 9:12-28, Ephesians 1:17ff.).