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Witness Inc. Home Page Contents Page for Volume
What is New
CHAPTER 2
As indicated in
Here is the Necessity of
Biblical Truth in this Area
v
Since it alone
provides the ingredients
v
which explain all
things that are actual ingredients of our situation,
v
without perversity,
reductionism or callow authoritarianism,
v
as is found in the
irrationalities of determinism,
v
or of voluntarism,
v
in their respective,
unbalanced and inaccurate harpings on only one facet of our affairs.
A. An EXCERPT from
Tender Times for Timely Truths, Ch. 11
Including
the scope of predestination - see also original above
STEP 2: CONSIDERING FURTHER
In
fact, there is nothing else that covers ALL the facts about man in this arena
of freedom, responsibility, liberty, limits, licence,
life, pollution, capacities, but this which is found in the Bible. NOTHING else
DOES OR EVEN COULD perform what is needed to explain and expound it all from
ONE BASIS.
Let
us review these things, then, a little, as we move towards our stated object,
double predestination, to see that it is so far from being obnoxious, that its
omission is devastating and absurd; and indeed, wholly unbiblical!
If
you have liberty, then it is YOURS, and then YOUR comparative advantages
advance you, so that your cultural superiority is for evermore made the crown
of your glory, the advantaged having advanced not only to power, position or
prestige on this earth it may be, but to heaven itself on the basis of nothing
more than an idiom of birth. This makes freedom a delusion, and hence as
reasoned in detail in Predestination and Freewill, and elsewhere,
is false.
If
on the other hand, God in fact did deploy a sovereignty that merely selected
for His own advantage, or wish, or caprice, and there is nothing at all to do with
the fact that human beings have an image of God status with wills, then man is
to be selected as he is, not as he is not. What then ? it becomes some X-factor
in man, some X-feature, or focus, which relates NOT to what is NOT there, but
to what IS there; for man is said to be FOREKNOWN, and hence it would be the
flattest of contradictions, to make the flat earth society look positively
mountainous by comparison, to assert that it is NOT something known. Of man, in
such a scenario, there is something known, and being known, he is selected.
If
it be maintained that it is something, which - while assuredly THERE in
the man chosen, or elected, or selected, or to be 'one of the elect' - is NOT
at all meritorious, then the doctrine is sound in so saying, but the
consistency is lost in having to say it. For if there be something desired and chosen, which
is NOTHING to do with human will, which, that is, omits the fact that this
basic feature of being in the image of God is THERE, then it relates to
something ELSE, and that ? It is the evaluable
reality of what the thing is, which is so chosen.
If
then you are SUPERIOR in acceptability to God, by virtue of what you ARE, then
superior indeed you are, for who better knows what is good, Himself being the
criterion, than God! But if you yet say, But no! there is NO merit, it must be
something which He does NOT appreciate, or desire, then this is mere
contradiction in terms. Further what possible MERIT is found in the beings
described in Ephesians 2 and 4! Such would be a contradiction of these things
AS WELL! We are not dealing with social niceties here, but with TRUTH, what God
says, and investigating what it means. We are not like some judges in the US,
in one phase of their history, it seems, deciding what is meant by the law (in
their case), and then adapting it to what it is deemed would be the will of
culturally sensitive people NOW, with the same intention!
That
becomes judicial amendment to law in the interests of interpreted culture. This
is wholly removed from the Biblical position (not surprisingly, since God is
God and man is His highly mobile... creation, attending to many things illicit,
confused and confusing, awry from his Maker).
What
is WRITTEN is the criterion here. It is the Bible which is being considered,
not considerations about what it would mean if it were adapted to this or that.
"frustrates the signs of the babblers,
And drives diviners mad...
who confirms the word of His servant,
And performs the counsel of His messengers"
- from Isaiah 44:25-26.
So, looking at both the cases above, the anti-predestinarians
(of this KIND) maintain their cause; and the autonomous man pugilists, those
averse to any such concept, maintain theirs, and there is no resolution. Nor
should there be.
BOTH
are astray from the word of God and are merely echoing, or paralleling in
religion, the antinomy justly found in secular thought (and it is justly
found because what omits the atmosphere when studying meteorology could not be
sound, unless there were none! and GOD is the subject looming above all others,
so how would His omission lead to anything but confusion, which is in fact,
over millenia, there the case!).
STEP 3: THE ANTINOMY IN SECULAR THOUGHT
HOW DETERMINATE IS DETERMINISM ?
In
secular thought, determinism cannot live any more than in religious
thought. First, in the latter case, starting with God: were HE determined, we
should simply have to find the notation expert adequate to invent such a
program, who in the ultimate, is the actual God, not some robotic device.
Determinism in monism, on the other hand, normally found in materialism, is - if
it were possible, even more ridiculous.
If
it all were determined (as by determinism for all things that are), then
it could not again BE determined by assessment of validity or right and wrong,
for from what source would things other than what occurs find mandate,
relevance or even existence! What it is, it is; and that is it. That which has
happened cannot on such a basis, be assessed on right or wrong, for
·
a) it could not be
otherwise than it is, in this model: so that standards are irrelevant illusion,
coming from somewhere which does not have the benefit of existence. What MIGHT
have happened is wholly irrelevant, inoperable, unattainable, as this is the
what-is model, and what DOES happen is ALL. To move outside the system is to
have somewhere to go; but on this system, it is all there is.
·
b) this would represent a
capacity for divergence of what is in the potential direction of what ought to be (as
for example, in terms of validity for such a theory as that of
determinism), which would simply be irrelevant in a supposed scenario of
... mere transpiring of events.
Or how COULD what could not be otherwise, be invalid ? in the model concerned,
it happens, exists and knows no contrary. It is immune from validity
considerations in principle, but in practice it supplies thought for its
validity, in seeking to establish itself; and hence it is self-contradictory,
logically being forced to employ for its sustenance, what it abuses.
If
however this sort of systematic event of a deterministic universe is NOT the
summit and the substance of all that is, so that things are, indeed,
assessable, categorisable as correct and incorrect,
right and wrong and so on, subject to logical assessment as wrong, whether or
not they happen to happen: then there must be at least a dualism, not a monism,
for monism's assessment and grading! It cannot be matched to standards which
cannot be there; for if what is, is all, then what is not, is not. From what is
not there, you put right what is there, so that what is there is left as right.
Obviously, this is thin air, vaporous, and nugatory, deploying non-existence in
order to shape what exists, a threadbare theory.
In
other words, illicitly, you come to a more realistic conception, by force of
what is being done, in the midst of what is happening!
You
then allow
a) a deterministic
component in reality and
b) an assessive
capacity, capable of error and detecting it, drawing principles or positions,
from another source, which hence becomes a second rank in reality: second in
kind, not in importance. This however is not determined; and the case is
not determinism, but dualism or other.
·
Thus logic is an
illusion, or the theory of determinism is. It is however, by means of logic
that this theory is put.
·
If therefore, logic is
an illusion, then the theory of determinism must lack validity in logic, its
admitted basis; but if, on the other hand, logic is not an illusion, then
theory is, for logic, in use, denies determinism as adequate*1.
Moreover, there must be error in the world of this system (called determinism).
Thus if the system is right, the contrary to it, is and must be wrong.
If, on the other hand, at the outset, the system is wrong, that is error in
itself.
Put
differently: if the system be true, it MUST be false, for it implies error by
its very assertion of a contra-distinct view from the range available. If then
error be objectively present, the theory is false, for objective error is a
separate reality from a one tier system where what is, is all there is. If on
the other hand, it should be asserted in defence of
the system (of determinism) that the error is not objective, but a merely some kind of delusive
subjectivity through which one does not attain to what is real, then the
theory works on things that do not hold objectively, without being able to
differentiate, and so fails as truth, masking and not representing reality. It
aborts logic in order to operate, while depending on logic in order to be accepted:
if however the abortion is correct, then the theory CANNOT be logically
established, for it denies the universe of discourse essential to its
establishment.
Wherever
error is, and it is inevitable as shown: what happens is not the end of the
matter, but a mere entry to what might be, and could become actual, if critical
assessment so determines, determining what is determined by means subject to
error, to thought, to invention in a multi-system reality, not monism.
If
then the theory is taken to be objectively true, it results in its being
objectively false. If however it be acknowledged to be objectively false at the
outset, the same result arrives! The falsity is universal in type,
inevitable. If moreover, it is a theory which operates on delusion, so be
it. It is not delusion which we are seeking, but truth.
Error
is an exhaust gas of the theory, if it be right; yet wrongness is proscribed by
the theory, nor can it accommodate it. If then it be true, it must be false. If
it be false, it is abandoned. That is all.
Further,
without absolute truth in existence*2, you
cannot find it, with which to make any statement concerning the nature of
things; and indeed, mere existence of it does not suffice, as your own limits
and relativistic involvement in the system, on this model of thought, make your
responses mere reactions, resultants of the interchange of things, banal
confinements for any communication, on the nature of what is the totality of
which these events would then all be mere particulate activities.
A
RESPONDER capable of discriminating truth, even when it exists and is
presented, not an activist capable of reacting to happenings, is then needed.
Further, the responder needs to be an adequate one, equipped with heavy
capacities to discriminate standards of assessment as a base for thought,
outside the happenings themselves. Again, he/she ALSO needs to be TOLD, since
the tele-psychiatrising of God by finite means is a
contradiction in terms. Even with one another, people with their spirits, are
the despair of psychiatry, which advisedly has in practice more and more
abandoned its illusory imaginations, and is moving to less expensive ... drugs.
(See SMR
In
short, you need man as well as God, and man who is possessed of capacities
which overview happenings, not in a series of actions, but in a standpoint of
understanding beyond any understanding. You need, in short, man's spirit. Since
you have it, when God sees fit to communicate to it, on His own basis, that is
fine. On the theory of determinism, however, you do not have it, and so cannot
illicitly, on such a model, use what you do not have!
It
is thus pleasurable to see, when examining such contrivances as determinism,
that they may help focus on the whole necessities for truth, which they are
found wholly to abandon. As we see in Ch. 3
of SMR and indeed Ch.1, these are found in
one place only, the self-revealing God of creation, whose communication is
there seen as required on the one hand by logic, and admired on the other by
unique verification, to which none can begin to compare.
Equally,
determinism makes a mockery of guilt, a folly of accusations of the same, as
when those holding this viewpoint attack others as ... wrong by standards that
are not identical with mere eventuation, or are even ... moral; and is
constantly at war with all the actual activities and stirred responses of man to
man. These things we have seen in detail in such places as Predestination
and Freewill, and here merely note for conspectus.
If it be held, however, that this ludicrous, not to say extravagant
extreme of determinism, is folly, that the case is the total opposite, that
autonomous man has his most distinctive thought, and that he is not in the
least susceptible to anyone or anything when he uses his god-like powers, THEN we run into a similar logical
impasse.
Thus,
if it is all a matter of what the equipment is that we so notably use, and the
manner in which the wonderful will of godlike man is moving in its vast waters,
then how can it ever get beyond the dimensions of what it IS, and be personal
in its imagined total independence ? Independent in what ? In its glorious
self, its psyche ? This given, it is free! Un-metered, it can measure … itself! It can ascribe meaning
without having it ? It can know without knowing itself ? It can get past itself
in order to determine itself ? To where ? Autonomy is in as much desperation as
determinism for ground of thought, as empty, as epistemologically defunct!
What
are the criteria, the parameters, the bases of the will relating to the
preferences of the psyche, in all its fascinating givenness,
to the dispositions of the heart, to the past, to the equipment for
consciousness and so on, to the culture*3
... it goes on.
Where
in the causal nexus is there liberty in that ? You see this because .. and you
feel this because ... and your causes go on in almost infinite regress and
interaction. Thought of in this way, it is but delusive, and liberty regresses
like the waves after a tsunami.
Thus
the desire
for secular liberty
reaches with dragging wings, to meaninglessness that yet ascribes meaning (SMR
pp. 292ff.), extending even to the
conclusions of dismal dismissal of the realities of error, of guilt, of
human relations, which determinism for its part, even more directly affronts in
blind contradiction. Meanwhile, in the land of 'liberty' through autonomy, we
find the chain-conditions or controls of inevitable containerization (the
containers are like chains, but in figure, they also are themselves chained,
for not only are they enveloping, but encapsulating like a prison, in a prison
compound of ramifying rooms); while the desire for secular determinism entails the contradiction of itself
in the attribution of mistake or even folly to those who think otherwise, by
their errors, duly assessable, and indeed reaches to antinomy in unknowability of truth with which to so much as state the
case, and to the removal of the validity of the person's thought who so thinks
even the theory!
It
is for this reason that law courts frequently seek to absolve from any real
blame, for both extremes lead to such confusion, and society pays for its
premises with ruin, now enraging, now astonishing the wayfarers who watch such
highly paid aberrations; or anon, lampoon them in cartoons.
STEP 4: THE HARMONY WHICH IS SO ARRESTING IN TRUTH
In
Christ however all this is as nothing. The WILL is relevant. Hence there is no
intrinsic denial of the reality of thought. This meets the necessities of
liberty. God does not evacuate these from His creation in His will. It was His
will to create liberties. It was in His own image that He created. What was the
nature of that creation, then, if it were not one with a will, even to the
point of acquiring guilt through wilful,
superficially based, disobedience! That was WILL par excellence, right in
Genesis 3!
Hence
man, divorced from his NATURAL relationship to the SUPERNATURAL, to God, is in
a profusion of confusion which tends to dampen all clarity (hence philosophy's
history) and to remove the structural soundness of all deep thought. This is
symptomatic of his divorce from truth, which is found ONLY in God, from whom it
comes, absolute and alone able to be such.
The
spirit of unredeemed man, designed for communion and co-operation with God as
Father, divorced and separated, is stunned either
into insignificance (denying itself in determinism, oblivious of logic), or
into delusive aspirations with wings but no atmosphere, as in autonomy.
Burrowing, buried and bewildered, now exultant, now distressed, it tries to
turn into god or sod, making nothing of either... for it is more than the one
and less than the other, and its actual status is not ... acceptable to
renegades from reality. It is true realisation of
reality hurts at first; but then, so does the beneficial drill of the dentist.
Decay may be acceptable; but it has consequences.
The
human will then ? This will, though present, therefore, is polluted. Further,
it is without God, and in man, a naked emblem of an image, a function of
a festering spirit. By Biblical statement (as in Romans 9:17, John 15),
it is NOT sovereign in man. Hence man's use of it towards GOD, does not
depend on his imperfections, moments of thought this way or that, inability to
know God because of sin, and hence on his comparative ability derived from his
equipment, environment, helpers and so on, at least to move in this direction.
How
could there be liberty if all this is what you ARE, so that your exercise of it
becomes a sort of historical episode! or whatever else you are, has no
(operative) basis, so that you are blown like wind ?
Biblically,
you DO NOT depend on that, so that you are free from that impasse. On the
scriptural basis, freedom does not evaporate in comparative advance of your
equipment, facilities, susceptibilities drawn from your upbringing, education,
political climate and so on.
All
these relate to what you MEET, and may influence what you ARE, but the two do
not meet as lord and subject. You find and you are, and what you are is marred,
and so often is what you find, but you have a deposit status from the creative
hand of the living God. If immunised to reality in
its wayward journeyings, the spirit of man is yet not
immune to the operations of God. Dope is cover, not king.
Put
differently: There is a structural residue amidst its functional decay. Your
image of God personality may be derelict in sin, and it certainly is not
competent to 'choose' God, in its exclusion by sin from His knowledge (I
Corinthians
If
however such were the case, and you did have enablements
here to find God in your own self, then again, your comparative conferments would lead to your comparative approach, which would
lead to your superiority of disposition, of origin and consequence being
enshrined for ever, as if such things produced YOU and nothing of
liberty or even of meaning were the basis. This! It is not freedom but manoeuvring. It is a situation, however, categorically
denied in the word of God, which thus categorically preserves and protects the
reality of liberty; but NOT the reality of SOVEREIGNTY in your exercise of it,
for being dead in sins (Ephesians 2), you are not alive to the issues as they
really are, as shown in I Cor. above.
Thus
the external impacts and the internal expressions for a given man, in his being
and experience, duly related, and each with endless seeming parameters and
backgrounds, are neither of them determinative. The internal ones are not
because you come from God and are able to be restrained or made aware of Him,
who is not determinable; and their very deficiencies are not determinative
BECAUSE it is NOT all in YOUR hands, nor do they control the outcome. This is
the perfect harmony of Biblical predestination with Biblical liberty, and
logical liberty, such as requires treatment in any non-reductionist
approach, which faces all the facts.
Liberty
is not lost, and liberty is not determinative. It is in God's hands. There is
the awesome actuality, which cuts across the secular delusions, the religious
confusions, and settles the matter in reality and in truth, according to His
making, nor our marring or sparring.
But
in God's hands, does it not lose its reality, some may pursue: if He chooses without respect to man
being in God's image at
all ? As shown above, this too is so, for such an imagined and imaginary model
is the expression of the preference of the preference expert, of the goodness
who is good, and knows what is good. What is it that is chosen ... the
best for His desire! What is the best, the equipment which has become so, which
in all its backgrounds, historical, political, social, psychological and so on,
has been the fortunate end-point of the events. Even the fabric of the soul is
moved in these ways, by many influences. At what point is this or that
influence determinative which, were it lacking, would have a different RESULT!
There is no liberty in that.
But
when and ONLY WHEN the CROSS is the selection criterion, or its equivalent in
the form of God as He proceeds with principles stated, but in glory
unspeakable, is there peace. Then it is the case that a NEW BEING is available
(II Corinthians 5:17ff., Colossians 3:10, John 3). It is NOT the you who
"chooses" which is made eternal. It is the YOU who has "NOT CHOSEN
ME", and of whom
He states, "BUT
I HAVE CHOSEN YOU!"
- John 15). With its new equipment, it has a wholly new set of realities with
which it lives: CHRIST IN YOU (Col. 1:27) is assuredly not the same, or
of the same order or sphere at all, as YOU! The infinite makes an
infinite difference, and His sinlessness is in the
sharpest possible contrast to your sinfulness, when unconverted (cf. Ephesians
2).
It
is NOT your QUALITY which is selected, then, as if to confirm that you are
indeed marvellous, by comparison with the riff-raff
which frankly, did not come into this Olympian Selection - if one might make an
implicit comparison with the selection trials for the Olympics. This is
precisely contradicted moreover in Romans 3:27ff..
It
is YOU! But what is this YOU, which is FOREKNOWN (Romans 8:29ff.), and hence
must exist to be chosen and known. This however is so only in the mind of God, for in the
creation of Genesis 1, we find the history of the creation of "the heavens and the earth" as in Genesis 2:4 - there is no
creation of some other kind which one may at leisure add; and this one
has kind to
kind continuance, not a
pre-contingent of created souls wafting about. Thus we abide in Proverbs 30:6!
But
what of your destining ? It is not now your character which is the
determinative, for then it is all the same thing, as before: where did it
come from and what influences and so on! And this would be indeed a subject for
boasting such as Paul states to be definitively excluded in Romans 3! It is not
your character, but your WILL in this, that this represents your capacity to
RESIST, to REJECT, despite the most marvellous
influences, the best fostering this earth provides!
This
is often precisely the case with many, and in one sense, it was pre-eminently
the case with Judas Iscariot, for was not CHRIST in amazing power and
tenderness, total discernment and compassion, his pastor! One remembers in this
context, Isaiah 26:10:
It is YOU who are chosen but NOT your will which chooses (as in Romans
Yet
it IS the case that God "would have healed
God "does
not willingly afflict the children of men" - Lamentations
As
shown in SMR App. B there is no way of
removing the meaning of Matthew 23:37, and Calvin's failure to make inroads is
similarly addressed in Tender Times for Timely Truths Ch. 2, End-note 1. CHRIST WOULD have healed the current
generation*4 of the Jews in
Misplaced
desire to 'protect' this or that may motivate such errors, but does not sustain
them. It is also necessary in view of Biblical principles, as also there shown,
concerning the guilt of the fathers and children, the one relative to the
other, to avoid anti-idiomatic efforts to make a generation division here.
It was the current people of
Indeed,
Hence it is the WILL of man which is relevant and the WILL
of man which is NOT SOVEREIGN.
It
is God who KNOWS what He is doing and with WHOM He is doing it, but who in so sovereignly selecting, and who is acting in the full sway
of His love, and not despite its absence, relative to those both chosen and not
chosen. GOD IS LOVE (I John 4:7ff.), and this being so, He is not unloving in
some things. He CAN HATE, but this is not without a cause, and as shown in The
Kingdom of Heaven Ch.4, this love is His
very being, and the results of its forfeiture do nothing to degrade it, but
rather to upgrade our realisation of the intensity of
that love, that He went so far to avoid for us what we deserve, that He took it
Himself... selectively (as in Romans 8:32 - where those on account of whom
the sins fell on Christ, are those who inherit all things).
He does not choose on the basis of merit or superiority; and
man cannot choose being blinded by the circumstantial correlates of sin,
culture and clouds of self-assertion, self-will, self-parameters and the like.
IF MAN COULD, then he would merely BE what he IS, and this having been in the
first place based on many things, would be a resultant, not liberty. IF GOD
WOULD dictatorially elect what was most pleasing in His sight, in its natural
circumstances, this would likewise be not liberty for man, but the tyranny of the pleasure of another, and whatever man might
be or want, this would be neither interpreted nor consulted. It would be the
MIND of another without reference to the nature of man in His image, a being
with some independence of spirit. Freedom in both cases is simply aborted FOR
MAN, either by his fall or his utilitarian selection, or subjection to
preference criteria on the basis of where he got.
In Cross selection however (as profiled in Colossians
1:19ff. with I Timothy 2:1ff., Romans 8:32ff., and John 15:21ff. and other
sites noted), all this is avoided. Man, as repeatedly shown in scripture,
as observable in Matthew
In His divine splendour, the Lord implements this,
not some caprice or personal hedonism. Love is not like that; God is not like
that; He did not act like that; He does not act like that. That destroys the
basis of love. Love enables the basis of freedom. That is the simple fact. It
does not simply crush or apportion IN MIND, what is to be disposed without
love. In love, it predestines with foreknowledge of what is the one
predestined, but without concern for meritorious achievement as the selection
basis. What follows regeneration is not the same as what precedes, even in
mind; the good tree bears good fruit rather than the good fruit bearing the
good tree. God plants the trees (Isaiah 61:3, Matthew15:13, Titus 3:5ff.).
Man
MUST be able to OTHER than he is, to be free, or as we have seen at some
length, he merely expressed his construction and environment, his history and
his genes, his gender and his culture, his appetites and whatever else he has
somehow obtained (cf. Predestination and Frewill
Section 1).
This,
if the ultimate, would be a mere puppetry in terms of liberty. Man MAY become
other than he is, through the regeneration of God as in Titus 3:5, leading to
his acceptance as a child of God. Man COULD NOT do this freely, if his
circumstantially oriented being were the LIMIT, in the matter, this being
merely the production of a product; and of course, if there were NOTHING ELSE
available, or, even if there were, it were not available because it was
invisible to sin, or despised because of his current nature, per force! When it is YOU who are diseased in
a blindness of spirit, a pathological situation which removes the eyesight from
your purvey, then choice is a matter of choosing what you will, but your will
itself remains, in its sad sickness and disability, the problem! IT therefore
cannot resolve for you the matter! This the Bible emphasises
in Romans 9 as in I Cor. 2:14 and John 15:1ff..
Man,
then, CANNOT in fact do this at all, constitutively, constitutionally, as
he is; as in I Cor. 2:14.
Very naturally, however, when God and the nature of the case, in fact,
move together, they combine with felicity. What man cannot do, would not, if it were done,
be the functional work of someone in God's image, since he is in sin and
thereby limited and distorted; and even if he could do it, in his sinful
state, present since Adam, except in the incarnate Christ, then it would not be
free. HOW can man escape himself, when himself is all he has ? Not at all. But
then man would not exist at all, being devoid of creation itself, if he were
all. The 'problem' exists only when you either ignore the CREATION OF A BEING
IN GOD's IMAGE reality, and so seek, if you will,
help for the sick heart of a panther, when your patient is in fact a man; or
else distort or ignore what God has said that the problem is there at all.
When
you consult what God has caused to be written, in His word, the Bible, and only
then, is the answer clear. This explains all, enables all, ennobles all. GOD IN
LOVE ACTS BEYOND MAN, and man thereby is neither the mere pivot of another's
power, nor the captive of his own littleness and lostness
of SPIRIT. Liberty is instituted, though sin withdrew it - not in kind, but in
relevant operation at this level, it still has dim light as in the heavily
polluted atmosphere, say of Gary, Indiana - but you do not see the realities in
this. Love is implemented, though hate may operate if in the end, it will.
Goodness is manifested in mercy, though it is not imposed. Light is everywhere,
and this is our current point: it is the light of the STRUCTURE of things about
man, in the SIGHT of his Creator who having made all, and provided initial
freedom, both knows how to implement the same, even with the rebel, and to do
so with fidelity to truth and in the very tenderness and beauty of what love
is. For love ? It does not selfishly seek its own; but it DOES seek to deliver
what it loves.
Such
is something of that vast magnitude, the love of God, which has a sort of
spatial expression in magnitude alone, and loftiness, in space, and another one
in time, where so much is enabled for so long, before the last chapter of the
book of sin is written, that which followed the crux of love in the Cross,
provides that final burning, for our God is a consuming fire, which is the lot
of what will never relent in its self-imposed littleness, never leave itself
for its Lord. It is bright. Its pain is inward: the conscience that cannot
speak for it is foul, the pride which cannot speak for it is exposed, the
remorse which cannot act, for the heart does not last forever, the spirit would
fail before the Lord, as He says in Isaiah 57. Truth is not commuted, nor is reality overthrown, while time finds its bounds as
He appoints, who in the first place, made our processive
time, where you MUST WAIT!
But
as to what separates, as to sin (Isaiah 59:1-2), love has borne the quintessence
of that already; and has provided peace with pardon and power, in the merciful
love of God, which is then the milieu of one's life. How any other could be
valued! But it is...
The
choice of God, then is not capricious; but costly. It is not inert, but intelligent,
like all of His ways. It is not an imposition, but an exposition; it does not
force, and it does not relent. It does however remit, but again, not in
caprice, but in capacity, bought and wrought in the Cross. This choice then is
that of God.
GOD
CAN and DOES DO IT, so that man is NOT dependent on his parameters. God does it
in LOVE, being LOVE (I John 4:7-8), in precisely the way Christ depicted and
showed continually (cf. SMR Appendix B, The
Kingdom of Heaven Ch. 4 and Spiritual
Refreshing for the Digital Millenium
Chs. 9, 10, 11, 12). Hence the disposition of force, not
freedom is not the case; and the decisions of farce, not liberty, are avoided.
This is the ONLY POSSIBLE WAY liberty could thrive, and indeed be found for
man. It must be beyond himself, but wrought in the love which knows what he
cannot know, and does what it alone can do. (Cf. Predestination and
Freewill pp. 121ff.,
in Section III.)
Love is the answer; the love of God, in the sovereignty of
God; with the integrity of God, directed towards the actualities of man, not as
an attainer, but to the heart, where God foreknows
what man would be, even if he could know. Yet this is not to state some form of
procedure in the divine nature, in the form of God; it must not be so
misunderstood. It is simply the case that the PRINCIPLES which He states, are
those which operate, in the way God sees fit to use them. What He affirms true,
occurs. That is as sure as His word is! It is entirely sure. It is here only
that the result, the solution obtains. That also is sure. The second verifies,
as all does in the end, the first.
It
is the COHESION of the principles as scripturally stated, and their harmony
with ONE ANOTHER and with ALL facts of life for man, and with liberty for which
man is answerable, and with the realities of responsibility, and the trials of
conscience, and the servilities of sin, TOGETHER WITH their provisions in and
FROM the living and PERSONAL GOD, who as a person loves persons: it is this
which ALONE CAN ANSWER the facts. Here alone is harmony conceivable. And here
it is found.
But
where else ? In the book which resolves all problems; and in this case as in
many, it does it in the only way it could be done.
But
that, it is hardly surprising! After all, the 'problems' come from the
interaction of man with God, of his environment with his Maker; and it will
HAVE TO BE, as a verification of man's very creation by God, that the answers
are found in the same God, who, creating, founded what now is to be understood
FROM HIM. ONLY His knowledge could be accurate and adequate to have it; only
His power could implement it, who knows the end from the beginning, alpha and
omega.
His
word is thus verified, not alone in answering the otherwise insoluble problem
in predestination, determinism and so on, on the one side, and freewill,
responsibility, on the other; but in answering it with that sovereign finesse
which leaves all other efforts to 'resolve' the 'problems' of life, unspeakably
little, wholly lost and without help.
What
then do we find? Selective in attainment, He is not selective in amplitude of
love, as in I John 2:2, for the provision of His anguish is ON BEHALF of all,
though it is bearing in practical reality, only those of the ones redeemed by
this bearing (as in John 8:21-24). If they did not believe Him, they would die
in their sins (John
SELECTIVE!
At that, the democratic soul may revolt! However, there is no need, whatever
may be the desire (for man is not always rational in these fields, but this
need not be so, either). The SELECTIVE results are to be found in meaning from
Luke 19:42 where He laments for the loss of
THAT
is the criterion of love. The RESULT in the Cross, is the indication of how
WISE the love was, that it went so far to gain what is lost. He was defaced
from the form of a man, we read in Isaiah 52. Thus the garbage (and undoubtedly
this is the intention of Mark 9 and its flames and worms, of Gehenna) is in that horribly intriguing but unwholesome
position of being both everlastingly dealt with and destroyed*5. C.S. Lewis deals with this in his own inimitable
style. The combination of these qualities, like smouldering
garbage, is not hygienic in its appeal, but it is necessary in its devastation
to realise that what happened to Christ, indeed
depicts the lot of those for whom the love of God is not preferred, for whom
the mists of darkness (as in Jude) are preferred.
As in many things, a
preference is not always DIRECT - as in the case of a man given up to the love
of money so much that - blind to it though he be - he is destroying his family
by neglect; but it is preference none the less. THAT is assuredly not his wish,
in many cases, but it IS the consequence of untamed and prior desire.
B. An EXCERPT from Earth
Spasm,
Conscience Chasm and Renewal of
EXTRAORDINARY ORDINARINESS,
FOR WITH GOD HIS
God's own ways are illimitable, for there is nothing to limit them - except of course Himself! That however is not a limit FOR Him but one FROM HIM! Thus God cannot lie (Titus 1, Barbs, Arrows and Balms 6 - 7), not because it is precluded by some force, agency or law, but because this is the way He is and wishes to be. If He could, then His would be a domain in which truth and purpose conflicted, and power and personality were awry, the one countering the other, His free actions and free words contrived into conflict, His person a turmoil, His life a struggle: but against what ? For there is nothing above Him, or beyond Him, for if there were, it would be He who, the ultimate, was just that very beyond.
As Psalm 145 tells us, His understanding is infinite and His greatness is unsearchable (Psalm 145:3, 147:5). This He attests by His word which is wonderful, which nothing ever aborts, for nothing is precisely the name of what could abort it. It does not exist because it COULD not exist. All is by HIS licence that does or can exist, and it does exist exactly because it is MADE to exist, for nothing has no inheritance or progeny, while what has been the base of all things, has been adequate for them for ever (cf. SMR Ch. 1).
It
is contrary to what God is and would be, that He lie (cf. Repent or
Perish Ch. 2, SMR Ch. 1, pp. 580ff., Barbs, Arrows and Balms 6 -7). Hence when His eternal word, enshrined
in flesh from conception as an infant in order to manifest Himself definitively
among men, comes into the world He is even CALLED the TRUTH, not a truth, a
contribution. His is the mastery, for never man spoke as this man (John
That is what you would expect, and it is of course verification, such as appears on all sides relative to God, His holy word to mankind, the Bible and His incarnated Son, Jesus Christ. Truth is like that: it coheres, it soars without trouble, it just is. When, as it were, it flaps its wings, it moves. When it stops, there is still.
But
then, you may ask, how is it that the Lord REPENTED of having made man, as we
read in Genesis
6 ? The KJV rather says this, that He was SORRY that He had made man. The
Berkeley Version puts it:
What to man would be
repentance, to God is grief. It is a sorrow of heart in terms of what is
occurring, but it does ipso facto create the concept of deeming what one
has done WRONG, merely burdensome to the last degree, a grief. To export human
conceptions to God is unwarranted, unnecessary and sadly defective. Where the
limited might repent, the unlimited is grieved, and moves toward aborting the
mission, except for one thing, the famous "BUT" ... BUT NOAH FOUND
GRACE. In other words, here is a pivot. There is a gracious favour
relationship still left, and on that hinges the future of the race.
God of course knew of these things beforehand, but we see something of the movements of the divine mind, its grief, its erection of the regress to ruin for alienated and unrepentant flesh, together with its insertion of grace (*1A), its action in mitigation and its result, ALMOST all goes, but SOMETHING CHOSEN stays.
That is what we find in Genesis 6ff. , and this the world will come to find yet more drastically as the appointed journey proceeds, and its saints, this time, are evacuated not to an ark but to Christ (I Thess. 4:1ff.), whom the ark symbolised (I Peter 3:21ff.), the only Saviour (Isaiah 43:10-11, Galatians 1, Ephesians 1:10, Acts 4:11-12).
It is the same with the coming of the Son of God as the Son of Man. In Psalm 22 (cf. Joyful Jottings 25) you see the predicted crucifixion quite clearly and in considerable detail, the tossing for the clothes, the bitter drink, the gaping bulls, the decrying and satire, the indifference and callousness, the suffering and the shame as Christ, the vicarious sin-bearer for all who come to Him, dies in apparent ignominy, which sin actually deserves, only to rise in indestructible power, which innocence actually gets, HE ALONE being innocent, for as to man, all else has sinned.
Now
when He CAME to this place in HISTORY, He did not fail to cry out, My God, My
God Why have You forsake ME! since this was in the predictive Psalm, out
some 1000 years for inspection before God wrote it into history itself.
Why then did Christ so cry out, with His precise knowledge of scripture ? Did
He not know what was coming, who so often and so vigorously announced it
advance, even rebuking Peter sharply when he tried to dissuade Him from the
cross, before it came (Matthew 16:17,23).
And that ? it is the shortest lived 'papacy' that ever was, for "one is your
Master, even Christ" (Matthew 23:8-10) as is plain for all to see, if they will (John
It
is the same that one is your ROCK, even Christ (I Corinthians 10:1ff., Psalm
62, Deuteronomy 32, Isaiah 44:6), and there is no other rock. "Who is a rock,
except our God!"
(II Samuel 22:22).
The ungraced
falls, the engraced (Ephesians 1:6, literally) is
planted firmly upon Him. But why did Christ repeat these predicted words - "Why have You
forsaken Me ?"
Christ so cried out because it was the expression of desolation which is the nature of the impact of unpardoned sin on the uncovered human breast (Isaiah 59:1ff.). This SEPARATES a man from his God; and when it is God who is so exposed AS MAN, then the cry of anguish is the stark, staring reality of our judgment being borne, even that of all who ever have come or will come to Him (Romans 5, Ephesians 1:4), for the Lord Himself has chosen us in advance, though He fain would have all, knowing the bounds HE SETS TO HIMSELF for His own glory, in accord with His will.
Love does not invade. It does not recklessly insist on its own way; and even God Himself, making all ways, does not assign to man what He deems inept. It is for this reason that in the Bible He so often is found impelling, despite all His majesty, His case, His cause, His truth, His mercy towards what times almost without number, is rejected or even reproved.
Knowledge
does not remove reality, but affirms it; and in reality God is love, and so
calls (Matthew
That again is why He is found advising us to SEEK THE LORD WHILE HE MAY BE FOUND, for as in the flood, above noted, He acted to extinguish all but a few of the flames of man, the fiery spirits of man embedded in their harbour of flesh, so He acts now.
He will not always strive with man (Isaiah 57:16). He will not always contend, for the spirit of man would fail before Him, since man is limited. It is wise then to seek the Lord at an apt time, for it is not only floods, but rather a hardening which becomes a permanent barrier, so that the desire being gone, the doom is apparent: it is that which is to be feared, many so trifling with Him that even His blood is trodden under foot, as if to put Him to an open shame (Hebrews 10). Blessed he, blessed she, blessed the child indeed who is brought in faith and repentance through that yet open door; grievous the lost whose heart may smite them, yet they do not relent.
God, however, knowing all, knows His own, and it is therefore a wonder so snug in truth, and a marvel so celestial in ultimate magnitudes, that the saved may rest in Him; for He gives rest. He knows His own whom He has saved, and as Titus tells us, this is a process from kindness to man, so that we have been saved, and come to an inheritance, as Ephesians 1:11 categorically states.
There are no 'if's' in such a
case, for purchase is final when once made (Romans 5:1-12, John 10:9,27-28),
the merely nominal becoming the witnesses of their own pretensions.
FROM FLOOD TO CROSS, FROM CROSS TO CONVERSION
Thus from the flood and the Cross we find this: that God certainly feels, and can be grieved, and that He may indeed reverse an operation in grief, but that for all that, He does not abort His missions or contradict His actions, but fulfils them with the infinite understanding of which Psalm 147 speaks. Nor is He even without counsel, for His thoughts embrace the actual end from the first, like a gifted novelist, who is very well aware of how it will end, but for all that enjoys and rejoices in the various stages of his book as he writes it. Nothing dashed by this knowledge of the ultimates for his characters, rather he is feeling - perhaps with acute sensibility - the various issues and challenges, trials and deep cogitations of his creations with no mean intensity, as they live before him.
With man this may be so; how much more can God so envisaging all things, and knowing all ends, yet harbour His thoughts in the ways to them, and vividly and with reality, compass the temporal as it goes.
He
has no time limit as do we (Romans 8:29ff.), for time itself is His stated
creation, and in whatever mode things in His eternity (for it is He who "inhabits
eternity" - Isaiah
57:15) transpire, in the very form of God (Philippians 2), it is certainly not
the same as our own mode, which often requires us to wait for what we do not
see, whereas God lives while what He does see, comes into due being at its own
due time. Indeed, for His purpose, He has actually SET SEASONS AND
TIMES for those on earth, yes for the very nations, if haply they might seek
Him (Acts
Let us hear this:
"Therefore, the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you: God,
who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth,
does not dwell in temples made with hands. Nor is He worshiped with men’s hands,
as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things.
And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings,
so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move
and have our being..."
Hence when the time for the flood comes, HE FEELS IT INTENSELY, one of our own novelists being quite able to do the same, and aghast in horror, feel the grief of heart that such a creature as he has just penned should be, and yet, with constraint, await the time of the end, before he shows its final configuration with due adjudication! There is then a sorrow of heart which is one involving rejection, of mind with a dissociative tendency, but this is held in the limits of purpose, and with God, these involve the resolution known from the first (Revelation 13:8), as in the "Lamb slain from the foundation of the world" (cf. Acts 15:18, Isaiah 46:10). Thus 1000 years in His sight, in survey, are as a day (Psalm 90:4). The engineering, the engines of power, the outcomes of kind, the interstices of sensibility, all are known, seen, evaluated of old, seen before time raised its little head and said, Here I am, wait!
This is not, in the confines of the other scriptures, to be construed as He does not care or know what the day is, for this is precisely what He created; but rather that as the AUTHOR of all this, He can see beyond it and above it, like an aeroplane above the impeding earth, free to rove and to see. What the earth-bound must wait in their trains and push-bikes to find, he wafts over at once!*1
Similarly, then, He felt the grief that such a thing as SIN should IMPACT on His very innocent and righteous BEING, and in that grief cried evocatively, "WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME!" in that rhetorical question of all rhetorical questions, in which reality showed its face, and love its heart.
So does Christ, God as man, show categorically and simply, the reality of these things. In Him, and in Him alone, in word and in deed, in grief and in joy, there is the unbounded felicity and wonder of God, put freely and voluntarily (Psalm 40) into the confines of flesh, yet without sin and without losing that identity by which He is who He is, for as He said, "Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8:58).
People
may wait years for some glory in astronomy, some due time for some conspicuous
event, but God announced His own coming both in detail and date (SMR Ch. 9, Highway of Holiness Ch. 4). The Jewish nation knew it, but failed to observe
its significance (cf. Luke 19:42ff.). Now that He has come and as for His first
coming in earlier days, so now in our time, His second Coming draws near, the
Gentiles as a whole , are inclined to do the same. What
Indeed, we see here how beautifully there fits into the sphere of His operations, this principle declared through Paul, "God forbid that I should glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ by whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world" (Galatians 6:14). Here is the actuality of the knowledge and thoughts of God, shown to the world, as His love, crossing the barrier, makes the sublime visible and the majestic lowly. This interface, this investment of the eternal in time, it has no limit to the imagination, since the all-knowing consented to become a baby, and the all-wise to become a youth, the all-caring to become a carcass in body, while His spirit soared back to His eternal home.
This, it would be wonderful; but reality is as far above this as the heavens above the earth. This would adorn poetry; but what He did adorns history, invaded geography, spoke to physiology in a language it had not often heard, and never without living human instrument, namely that it resume its tasks in higher modes, and to anatomy, that it come back in better build, less limited by space, but still able to occupy it. Thus reality had bow to it, the creation, and majesty had come to it, the little dogs of the earth, like a huntsman calling. The victim became the victor, and the ineffable the impregnable, for death itself obeyed Him no less than the winds and the disease, the corpses which He had raised when still alive in the flesh on earth. (Cf. Resurrection, Index, and SMR Ch. 6.)
Just as ONE failure then would have ended His ministry, for that would show that He who failed was not God, so ONE TRIUMPH here showed His authenticity (Romans 1:4), by resurrection there being declaration, THIS is the very Son of God!
· Thus is the spasm of earth brought its antidote, though many insist on its cerebrated convulsions to the end, and will gain them for their pains; and so is the chasm of human conscience brought its balm, for now is the blight detached, to be re-attached to Him, alone able to dare it, bare it and make it despair through His triumph, for thus our sins and our iniquities He will remember no more (Hebrews 8), for He has so obtained an eternal redemption (Hebrews 9:12-28), in ONE only action, ONCE performed for ONE people, who are HIS!
· Thus renewed eternally, their inward man being renewed as the outer perishes, they come at last to the bastions of eternity, conducted by the work of Christ, that finished work of grief and delight (Hebrews 5, 12) wrought on earth, but above this earth, for His thoughts are not our thoughts.
To our present purpose, then, we see something of the thoughts of God in their very uniqueness, from what in His kindness, He has seen fit to expose. Indeed, being exposed on the cross, He saw fit to manifest the deepest truths from a pulpit extraordinary, an altar sublime, a tower indestructible, from which He still appeals to men, drawing them to Himself from this lowly eminence (John 12:32-33). It is there shown that it is in His DEGRADATION that He so draws man, that He in His exaltation should condescend to such ignominy in such a cause, for such a REMOVAL OF JUST GRIEF with such an annunciation of JUST JOY, thus showing the whole heart of repentance once and for all.
God's grief, as exposed in Genesis 6, and often thereafter,
is made manifest to man at his strenuous sins, devious iniquities, blatant
inequities, and spiritual squalor; yet it is this which becomes the valley of
His triumph, for He has overcome it in His action, wrought by His counsel,
accomplished by His living word, incarnate, resurrected, and to return in
power. Man's repentance is the divine outreach that finds it mark, and this
both without force and by a divine knowledge that recovers and does not ignore
the nature of what He has made, its very nature in His own image, nor sidestep
his plight.
REPENTANCE, REALITY AND RENEWAL
Here on the Cross of Christ, what do you see ? It is the aversion of God to man in his sinning continually, His horror at this thing, His impulsion to degrade and despatch this unseemly mess, as often justly assailed from His mouth for its pride in its supposed morality as for its debasement in its admitted follies. Thus many harlots go into the kingdom, being repentant, before many of those so exalted in their own esteem, and trusting in their own works, that their overweening self-glory, in all its feigned modesty, is more atrocious for heaven to bear, than the most debased failure (Matthew 21:31-32).
The same revulsion is seen in Isaiah 1, where God excoriates the rhino flesh of the super-sanctified bastions of self-assurance, hating their devious hearts in sacred clothes, while their actions expose their cunning contrivances, or indifferent plausibilities, mingled with pride.
The ultimate category in the divine grief at man is surely then this, that there IS REVULSION and there is GRIEF, but there is also ACTION and RESOLUTION, so that what is appalling past bearing, is able to be MADE APPEALING through action. Then, even when this action involves the coming into fleshly format of God Himself, via His eternal word, sent from heaven for the purpose (John 3:16, Isaiah 48:16, Zechariah 2:8, I John 1, 4), His eternal life set in such a form as this (Philippians 2), He is able to distinguish the execrable from the redeemed, and to make the one the other as He will! Thus repentance becomes restoration, the divine grief becomes spiritual grandeur, and wiping out becomes the wiping of tears of contrition in those reached by His Spirit. In this way, love has its ambit, purpose finds its target, the Fisherman uses fishermen and men are found, yes women, children, households joining the household of faith.