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NEWS 132
Poor Calvin,
Poor
but you are rich!
The
Abyss of the meaningless,
created from dismissing the ground.
Calvin and Hobbes Cartoon, The
Advertiser,
US Election Week, ABC News
No! This is not about the moral governor of Geneva in the 16th century. It concerns the cartoon - with Hobbes.
Those who do not dabble in the meaning of humour may find this hapless; it is however this Calvin who is hapless, because he is hopeless. Amidst his normal penetrating obtuseness comes this gem, this star.
What then does this cartoon character DO ? Observing the stars in their multiplicity and scope, with a glimmering of their pure vastness, this little figure mouths suitable cultural exhibits, reflecting dimly the cultural 'advances' of our time, as enlightened as the dark abyss that glooms to the altitudinous observer.
The little 'child' of the cartoon, in this vast midst of a meaningless-tagged magnitude of stars, nocturnally gleaming, gazes in dumb (rather than enlightened) wonder, then with the haste of littleness, advises his companion, Hobbes, that it is needful to watch TV. If Wordsworth, looking at such wonders as the grass or flower, finds thought too deep for tears, then this cartoon Calvin for his part, finds thoughts too deep to ponder, frightening, arresting, deplorable or inconvenient ... in the stars, their volume, expanse and magnificence.
Hurled from one cultural darkness to the next (though there are exceptions, luminescent like stars in the depths), the cartoon child Calvin wants preoccupation with the tutelage of ignorance, on the TV: to watch the pre-prepared infant soups, to share the old illusions, divorced the more from his source, by having gazed witlessly on some of His works, in space (cf. That Magnificent Rock - TMR - Ch. 7, Part F, with tag-words from the generation of the dispossessed (q.v.).
So Calvin.
ASSISTED SUICIDE OF CHILDHOOD
DR DEATH FOR JUVENILES
This is the
suicide of childhood, ably assisted by the Dr Death of chaotic culture. While
thousands are concerned at the continued lifespan (possibilities) of just ONE
of a pair of recently separated Siamese twins, millions of children,
unheralded, die again as they are skilfully separated
from their Maker; indeed, the world smiles, and aids the process of arid,
defiled, defoliated unbelief, forwarding it as though poison were purity, or
death were life.
DEPERSONALISM
But to what is this fool's non-paradise due ? Whence comes this awkward awe, this doctrine dispossessed, this vagrancy, replacing the human source, home, meaning, and vision ? Without truth (by presupposition), they announce what it is! This is the way of the magnitudes without meaning, the agnostic flotilla, the irrationalists of the Age.
It cannot too often be under-scored that this particular alogism, irrationality, self-contradiction, is now a virtual additive to baby food.
It is time to grow up. THAT way, what is in principle being divorced from ALL reason, cannot THEREFORE USE reason in any of its ideological contrivances, argumentative emplacements or appealing presentations. It is, literally, mindless.
Reason requires, logic requisitions a better way. Leave it and be silent to all species of reasoning, or accept it.
If the former, we come again. Calvin CANNOT now be told ANY truth about the meaning, emplacement, significance of the universe! If he is, absolute truth must be, must be accessible, and that without the defilement from the means of knowing it (the agent). If so, then it HAS to be personal, didactic to declare what is past all relativity and, as absolute, in no way conditioned BY ANYTHING. Subject to no conditions, it is hence immaterial, of no derivative constitution, independent, unsourced and self-existent. It does not DISPLAY the contrivances of system implanted; it is what it is in itself without aid or invasion, intrusion or commencement. It is SELF-SUFFICIENT.
This is ONE way of seeing the necessity of the God of all meaning; just as the necessity of adequacy for all the ordered forms, forces and functions of the multi-strataed universe is another (cf. SMR Chs. 1-3).
Together these conduct us to the non-irrational basis for all meaning, in God, objective, requisite as source.
THE PATHOLOGICAL TISSUES
Chaos, as noted in SMR Ch. 3 and TMR Ch. 7, is not even a logically coherent concept for any universe. Its conditions obliterate its existence and knowability alike. What then do we find ? What is for the void so made ? They ponder. They create (very much in the style of children astray, who used to be said to 'create'!).
What ? This then. The pathological tissues, aggressively invaded by truth truants of our time (but the process and the practice is OLD), by the circulating fluids of blasphemy, the viral proliferations that invent as an option, forwarding what ? It is a god of love-for-liars, predilection for those who absent themselves from the category of truth, that they thrust into the popular mind. Those who follow these delight in obsessive maniacs who parade themselves or their system as if God, or opt for them for their own reasons... but as to these 'creators' among men, in fact, they make a god (call it what they will), a source, a dynamic, a thrust, a control, who looks on the devious deceits of man and is unmoved, or tolerates them with steadfast mien.
While this imaginary idol witlessly grins on all things, they fashion him like the other idolaters of old, a god of process, moored to moral delinquency and truth vacuity, with no rules of righteousness, no determinate remedy for the atrocities of man, no orders of truth, no personality or scope for the individuals who then litter the earth like Autumn leaves, of some value once, but now debris. Debasing their source, executing logic and causation alike, wafting existence into being as if by oversight, and law by its contradiction, they make themselves far greater, and so become less than life, flitting about in philosophy like sand driven by the hot winds. It is only right, for it is accurate, to notice that precisely such rubbish of reckless rumination is forecast for the terminal phases of the age, yes, if you will the post-Christian Age, itself also predicted, in the words of the New Testament of God*1.
But let us return to the abyss of our concern. While, then, the rules of this illusionist nonentity, these 'creators' affect to know, though this oddity neither speaks nor knows, they pontificate with words to fill the nothingness of their creation. Without truth, or even any possible access to it, they declare, whether as Freud, Darwin or Marx, or with drifting baseless dreams of New Age ... But what do they declare ? the products of products, precluded by what lacks definitive voice: and so come, 'arise' the religious humours of humanity from the artisans of self-contradiction, knowledgeable ignoramuses who preclude what they include and spout what they exclude.
This denuded and reductionist myth, in this or that of its many forms, is then blasted by the loudspeakers of philosophy. In China this has often even in rural areas, LITERALLY occurred with literal loudspeakers literally blasting their impenitent impatience into the air to obtrude into the harassed minds of the hearers. In Russia, it could be aided by the drugs of pharmacy, as the spiritual pollutants were eased into their irrational positions, in minds intentionally made to be disturbed.
No wonder the international body of psychiatrists objected. But it is all in vain, this authoritative irrationalism, these gods of man's making, of man who is merely an imagination made by God, given imagination, then perverting it. This perversion does no more than any other to create truth, but simply desecrates it.
As if what made truth, lies; or as if what cast reality, obstructs it; as if what invented right relations, despises them, a bundle of contradiction, at war with His products which He freely produced, at odds with His constructions for what they are first made to be; or as if what made man, rejoices in man's demise, a figment of fall, deluded, devious, adrift from truth: this, it is only one more contradiction. MAN can give God NOTHING, for ALL He has is donated. Existence is His product, rationality a mode, order a feature, causality a conveyor belt, imagination a construction for other worlds, which can occur if not contrary to the conditions imposed without.
Man can but receive, and receiving, produce. The eternal God, however, the necessarily self-sufficient source, He is not dependent on anything, His creations included, and not deficient in any respect, or conditioned by any disproportion of desire, He needs nothing, can be met by no gift for His satisfaction, that He might be pleased; for He is pleased already. But with rebellion He is not pleased; and with love He has acted; though with indifference man has acted. The love of God if reciprocated through rebirth and restoration is indeed basic, and with this God is pleased; but He is not dependent on it. Moreover He knows it from the first (as in Ephesians 1:4), being limited by nothing, and time with its delays, being His invention: for NOTHING precludes His knowledge, limits or conditions His coverage.
God does not contradict Himself, nor does He suffer contradiction, in the end; for what He is has no impingement of anything, from anything, to modify, contest or constrain. The waves that fling themselves with thousands of years of effort onto the resistant rocks have far more chance of success than those who attack God. He is, and He changes not at all, always being what He would be, always knowing what will be, never surprised by the brilliant plans of man. Replete with His own methods of handling such cases, He has declared His ways, which do not change, rigorously in advance (as in Habakkuk 3:6, Malachi 3:6; Psalm 2, Isaiah 44-45, Daniel 9 and so on, ad infinitum as near as may be!). He has made and He has spoken to what contradicts His justice, His truth and His righteousness. He might have destroyed it for ever; but He has done this instead.
If it were not so, then the being being discussed, would be some other being.
The requisition of reason is not less; and God, He is what He is, and is shown by His works to be: into the empyrean of grandeur and majesty one looks, and He is greater than all this, but not less. On His greatness, there is and can be, no limit. His divine nature and eternal power are indeed obvious (cf. Romans 1:17ff., John 14:10,12, 8:58), the only alternative to nothing: which of course if ever all, having no future, would forever be all; which however it is not. We for example, are here. (If you want the detail see SMR, TMR and the other works, and see Apologetics in Index.) Any system requires its cause, and even a system of linked up gods requires the cause of the inter-active capacities, the universe for the interaction and the conditions for co-operation, merely taking the matter back by imaginative intrusion. ONLY what always is and is not IN ANY system which limits or contains, CAN be the ultimate. A group of gods in a system merely signifies that the system plus god maker is still to be found.
God, however ? He simply is, and cannot be BECAUSE... He is therefore ONE and without necessities. He is truth and requires it. It is His (cf. John 14:6).
If He takes a form, as of a man, in Christ, then
this form is what it is designed to be, but God who took it is merely
triumphant in whatever His purpose may be, here, to die for sin for all who
would be free of it (John 3:16-30), to ward off the doom, which is just and
awesome for man, in those who receive Him (as in John 1:12).
Man without
truth is divorced, not deficient; and man without meaning is contrived, not
actual. God without action is imagined, not mirrored. God has spoken into the
world of rebellion, and has acted to remedy its inattention to reality, on the
Cross of Christ, in the volume of truth, in the resurrection of the body, in
the control of history and in the words of direction to all. These never fail.
This is the empirical fact. (Cf. Barbs, Arrows and Barbs 6, SMR Chs. 1, 3, 8, 9, 10). God is contradicted; but He is
communicative. Remedy is realisable but it is often
rejected. It continues till this hour, available. Meaning is prolific. Its
rejection does NOTHING to remove it, compromise it or deflect it, except from
the life of the spiritually pathological, which merely enhances the disease.
CALVIN IN NEED
Poor Calvin! What a generation he is used to speak of, to describe, however ludicrously, with a wit not without pity on its contemplation.
It is necessary for the millions of Calvins, whose bright intelligences are blasted by this pathological culture of elaborate but ineffectual evasion, to be freed from fiction, delivered from self-contradiction, returned to reason, and turned to seek the Lord where He attests as nowhere else, reality to reason by revelation.
The Lord whom he
should seek, he is not far from any one of us. His word that distinguishes Him
in His majesty, which indeed make the stars in their conditions and courses, is
not hidden (cf. Isaiah 45:18-19). It, His word, predicted Christ, who predicted
this terminal phase of our Age with elaborate precision just as His own works
were predicted before (SMR Chs. 8-9, Repent or
Perish Chs. 2, 7).
It has characterised our current philosophic and
social conditions as they develop (Romans 1:17ff., pp. 103ff., SMR pp. 659ff., 857ff., 925ff.), with all their elaborate
strivings to avoid creation (II Timothy 3, II Peter 3 cf. Benevolent
Brightness or Brothy Bane 74), and redemption
(II Timothy 3:5, II Peter 2:1, II Timothy 4:3).
Philosophy ?
But what of
Say
Consider the application.
Calvin
is not only a representative of depersonalised
children, divorced from the blessedly personal Creator, ignorant of the offers
of the personal Redeemer, lost in ignorance amidst the traffic of knowledge.
This same depersonalism, evacuation of the one, true,
attested, requisite, verified speech-presenting God, is now in sight for what
was Palestine, was Israel and is. What the philosophic-religious complex has
foisted elsewhere, now is featured in the
social-political field.
THE MASTERFUL MEANINGLESS
The UNITED NATIONS, says
Arafat, bring them in! Let them be in
Yes ? What is it like ?
Bring in, then, the Democratic Party, on its own authority, to check the recent
presidential vote in
But for what, answer the Republicans ? Scope for just what!
So in
Evict God, then, for that is
the prerequisite, as with children, so with
They have their whole history
recorded in overview in Leviticus 26ff. and Deuteronomy 28ff., from Moses,
including the Christ who was to come, came and is to return (as in Psalm 2, 16,
40, Ezekiel 36ff., cf. Joyful Jottings,
and Answers to Questions 5, Acts 1, SMR
Appendix A). For HIS OWN NAME'S SAKE, God
declares in Ezekiel, they are to be returned and founded. They are also in
large measure to be won (Zechariah
God does not change (Malachi 3:6). What He says, He will do (Isaiah 44:24ff.): emphatically! His marvellous gift of freedom, which incorporates provision for a PERSONAL love for each other or Him, and meaning and personality (cf. Predestination and Freewill, A Spiritual Potpourri Ch. 16, SMR pp. 348ff.) is NOT another name for indifference. It is not a synonym for no decrees, let alone no mind on the part of Him who MADE MIND FOR MAN and invented the whole concept of creating such things - limited and non-autonomous of course, for HIS is the system - yet free to rove and imagine, even folly if it will. Freedom however is not power. Rather it needs it!
As for the Lord, He WILL have His
way, even if He has made OUR way available through APPARENT, predicted and
intentional weakness at Calvary, a necessary device, since sin does make weak
and He BORE IT for all who come in faith to Him, as He is (as in Isaiah 53,
55). The Cross, benevolently contrived in the plan of God, the epic that led to
Christ's epochal resurrection, required and received power (I Corinthians
He said He would: He did. He
would have the Jews back; they are. He would have them victorious in multiple
wars. They are. He would have the menace to
The UN is not God. It is HIS presence, not that of the committed, exceedingly non-neutral UN, which decreed NO Jewish Jerusalem before the Jews, despite this unity of nations, made it Jewish in 1948; and it has since not softened its exclusivist, world posture on the place. It is the UN versus God. Have them on site then ? Have this partisan in position in this area, arena ?
Is this then the body, which in
1947 and since, has sought to remove the millenial
capital of
What a fabulous idea!
Small wonder then that Barak says NO! The answer is no before the question even arises. You do not arbitrate by such bodies, strongly aligned where alignments are the question!
Will you deliver your sons to the invader, when it comes in the name of "the world", with any better reason than to any part of it, with its own passé pronouncements - whether of the Reich for 1000 years, or the broken 'science' of Communism, which like that of evolution, DOES NOT WORK! What a science! It starts where it should finish, with the conclusion, and then implements where it should begin, with the facts, which, being absent, seem to leave some of the innovators with justifiable concussion leading to talk of sudden surges, but of what and why ? No answer. No science, only dreaming.
But God is no dream: HE is the ONE whose word has told what would happen, and does happen, in creation. It does not go on. it is finished. When the Creator creates, you get it; when these procreators call man, create, they are very limited, having neither the power nor the authority of God. Their imaginations are a credit to His power, but no substitute for it, even in their philosophic dreams, in fantasy foisted onto science and dropping off like water from a rain-coat.
Neither the
political nor the philosophic pundits without God can know anything. When they
operate in unified obfuscation, their ignorance almost the more is! When they
contest His word, their power is on the table. They will be very determined;
hence Armageddon. But to invite such forces ? Who
could concur who is the butt of their disablement for this half century! Not Barak.
THE MEANINGFUL MASTER
It is not to the dynamics*2 of depersonalism
but to the realities of the Redeemer that
The One who made man knows how to handle His rebellions, in reason as in real estate, as Psalm 2 so well shows, and history so implacably attests (cf. SMR pp. 712ff, 623ff., Ch, 8). He who died that man might live (John 3:16, Revelation 1:18-19) has a love more incandescent than the fires of the stars, but is unwilling to use force as He sues for souls, as communism and other servants of violence have done; yet He is free to deploy it for His plan without compromise to liberty or truncation of truth. The liberty which mankind has used and abused is colossal. History is a vast laboratory panorama of man's ... deeds. But there is an end. When the imagination is exhausted and the world is drained, reality in truth itself is not eroded. It rules. He comes. He came. He will come. He is always on time. His plan and counsel is supreme, superb and wonderfully kind.
Into this, all fit. It invites, incites to
liberty, in love, but
when rebellion crests, despising
His sacrifice at
That
? The apt moment
? Be assured, it is near (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5).
NOTES
*1
See II Peter 2:17 where the spiritual
lewdness of love for idols is thematic, as illustrated so amply in Hosea, and
the verbal conundrums following are featured and focussed;
II Thessalonians 2, where the decline from a former height is forecast, in
spiritual things as the Age draws to its highly dramatic close, and II Timothy
3, where the delight in form rather than power, which was to come, and now has
come, is in view. See also II Peter 3 in connection with the anti-creation
thrust, as considered in detail in Benevolent Brightness or Brothy Bane 74, pp. 103ff..
*2
Meaning has might, and might without meaning is
assigned, phase by phase, to the oblivion its delusion deserves. Hence empty
empires (SMR pp. 712ff., 623ff.,) slither as slush to the slag
heap of history.
Meaning has source, the source has sentences and the sentences include sentence in judgment and justice, on severance from source. What can you expect ? Cut it off from source and it withers, for its connection is its life, as well as its meaning. This embodies love, for the sentence on sin, transferred to Christ, for all who believe in Him as He is, and receive what He has done, can only be received by the wilful, not only in life, but with it! who stop at nothing, and so are stopped by what is not nothing... It is these who add preference for darkness to their other sin (John 3:15-19, Colossians 1:19ff., John 15:21ff.), and so inherit it.
It is never possible to achieve an independent realm, since reason itself, man and the world are alike derivatives from God. The ONLY result of that insidious, invidious, capricious, oh yes, and that poignant rebellion, from the Creator, the Redeemer, the Payor, that Love in His grandeur and deep intensity, in the universe of His construction, is where it is thus shunned... in everlasting destruction. This is not least, of reason - not of this itself, but merely as murder IN man's soul. The destruction moves on to that of that blessed and eminently desirable destiny WITH Him, who made man, the desire of the nations (Habakkuk 2:7). Thence destruction comes to the place for peace, purity, vision until at last, it comes to the removal of all hope, in hell, that discard centre of those who discard the truth, in everlasting contempt (Daniel 12).
It is part of the wonder of God's holiness that heaven is perfect, being the site for those whose purity is conferred from Christ, whose presence invests His people with peace, whose pardon is achieved by Christ, whose light is Christ and whose life everlasting is His which He has given according to His word (Revelation 21:8,22, 23,26-27, Hebrews 12:12,27).
It is part of the marvel of His kindness that
the achievement of hell is not a matter of misdeeds, but of misalliance
inveterate, with darkness (John