COMMANDS - THE REGALIA OF REGALITY

Liberty must reason with command, for though its parameters for man are vast, the race is not composed of gods, but partial programmees^*A equipped with spirit, contained by the Creator without whom they are as dust on the shelf,
and with whom like children in the school of life.

Psalm 1 says some of it, Psalm 2 more of it and Psalm 100 with 103 gives a genuine lesson in knowing the life you are living, whether in the darkness of obscure domains, self-willed, or in the light of life which took the trouble

Comparing yourself to Him is unprofitable, unproductive and ... rather ridiculous!

They were all seated. It was a lovely aircraft, filled with food, comfortable seats, its well-stocked galley providing materials for ministration from adept and adroit air-hostesses. Rules of conduct were clear - for example, you were not permitted to indulge a desire to enter the cockpit and talk to the Captain, or to annoy by careless noise or aggressiveness, your fellow passengers.

Ethics had been worked on, to ensure that nobody could be fazed. Polite references to the physique, procedures and principles of others were de rigueur, if they were made at all. The envy of many others in the airline industry, they had only one weakness.

Now the Captain was in a democratic mode, and although his safety and capacity to perform were guaranteed by the social rules and ethical concepts, it was by consultation with the passengers that the route was chartered. It appeared that the concept of destination had been downgraded to the point that it had actually been omitted. The purpose of the journey also had been discarded as too metaphysical. They were together, moving, fed and comfortable. As one of them had said, What more could you ask ?

Action, he had declared, this was the thing man needed, not sitting in the doldrums of depression or engaged in inscrutable talk about life. So they acted, and went, but nobody knew where. The subject was, not to make too fine a point of it, delicate. It was discerned by the discerning that there was here a potential conflict, so they were on until they crashed and were all killed, very ethically, and until the last moments, with great comfort.

To the wiser among men - those who had not been on that aircraft - it soon became apparent that this was rather an inert way of handling things. Sparking spokesmen, sparse on top but not with words, inveighed with their ways into the multitude who consider such things. CONFRONTATION is what is needed. That soporific, supine substitute for flying had only one place to end, on the ground. It did. We cannot spare aircraft for that kind of folly. You need to assert yourself, make your plans definite, and get places, whatever the opposition, he had declared, and having a population of those with a faint recollection of fighting on beaches and blood and sweat and tears - metaphorically only of course, for there are no beaches in the air, the next aircraft took off. Confrontation is the way, get your own way and let no one dictate.

A small aircraft, not covered in the air-management frame of things, in order to facilitate independence of spirit and flight, appeared uncomfortably near to their now soaring airliner. The Captain glowered, and consulted with the passengers in the democratic mode. What do you think ? he asked. Is this the time for confrontation ? No, they answered with one voice - in fact, that of the Head Stewardess, which had a nice crisp, clear timbre, deemed suitable for rapid communication that mattered.

The Captain wondered at the failure to confront, but deeming it probably a case of the small craft not being a foe worthy of his steel, went on, mulling and considering. As they approached the first part of their flight plan, a small airport, the Captain realised that a first part implied a second, and asked the passengers if they had any ideas past been confrontational and making this first landing, as it might affect the fuel load he would take on, and since they had to be ready to confront anyone, anything, anywhere at any time, he needed an answer.

They consulted while he flew on, and seeing that they were already proceeding in a northerly direction, having left behind their small airport during decision-making, on checking with maps, they resolved that to save money, for someone always has to pay in these matters, they would go North. Selecting a moderate-sized airfield where he could refuel, and deciding next time to check sooner, he found the passengers desired next on their main plan, a target where tough stuff might be apt, so that their principles could be tested, giving that pleasant sense of getting on with things, for so they told the pilot.

Pleased, he refuelled approprriately and proceeded towards the new destination, and naturally, being a Captain of some forethought, he kept a fuel margin for confrontation, for as everybody knows, these are confrontational days in any case, and you never know how many confrontations you may have. Taking off with suitable power thrust, for a confidence builder, he proceeded North.

By this time, they were definitely getting into the Northern part of the Northern Hemisphere, which was all right in its way, except that it was growing cold. Ice was beginning to form on the wings. Rather like some of the little dogs which can seem so aggressive, he decided to come down to a lower level where he saw a brilliantly lit air-liner, coasting along with such extravagant ease, not a sign of ice, that it seemed a confrontation with such ostentatious well-being might be needed, to assure themselves that their self-esteem was warranted. Descending on this liner, he radioed a question: Would you kindly land!

This was disastrous, since the air-liner, suspecting - that it, its Captain suspecting - that this was more than a manoeuvre limited merely to securing psychological results, and possibly a preliminary to air piracy, replied with a confrontational mode of his acquaintance, deciding that anyway, this was a Western type aircraft, and one less would be good. He despatched a rocket and the aircraft of our acquaintance then descended to a destiny similar to that of the one before.

Back home, the folks were beginning to feel that there was a lack somewhere in their planning facility. Hence they consulted more vigorously. While, of course, no one could so commit himself or herself as to make an actual decision about where the aircraft should go, circumstances and conditions and developments always being fluid, so that one has to have scope for continual adaptation, it was felt that some sort of makeshift concept should be around, to enable more decisiveness.

Hence they decided to go South next time. Someone asked why go anywhere at all, but this was deemed frivolous, for people with energy have to go somewhere. Further, it was resolved after much metaphysical discussion, which vexed some, but not enough to prevent it, since death is so difficult when it comes to adaptation, and so upsetting for the concept of necessary motion, that confrontation was out. It is necessary to be peaceable, for then you could go further.

They took off, evacuating the airport as if it had been a rubbish dump, so keen were they for action and motion and doing things, and South they went. An airliner drew near, and its pilot indicated that they should land, as he had problems which he wished to discuss personally in a way mere verbal communication seemed inadequate to conclude, so the pilot, smirking a little and feeling most assured, not even bothering to ask the passengers on this occasion, since it could be too time-consuming in a crisis, which he deemed to have arisen, shot it down, feeling this most conducive to peace in the long run.

Confrontational! exclaimed the passengers in disgust, but since there was no alternative pilot on board, they merely simmered, and had their cocktails shaken more assiduously to ensure a smoother finish, wishing by this indirection also, to indicate to the Captain via the expected comments of the stewardess, that more smoothness was a thing needed. The Captain then deemed it politic to make an announcement, so he announced that the aircraft had made dictatorial remarks which could only indicate piracy, so that he had shot it down rather than allow the reciprocal to happen first.

The passengers were heavy in discussion as to whether this was really non-confrontational, until someone pointed out that they all wanted to survive, so that they could continue in being active and in motion, thus ensuring consent, apart from one or two who felt there was such a thing as what life was for, who were instantly deemed confrontational and arrested.

In a little, three fighter aircraft arrived on the scene, and one radioed the message, In view of your aggressive posture in not doing what one of our airliners asked you, courteously and with proper submission, for we believe in submission, we are going to shoot you down. You will have to shoot me up before you shoot me down, said our aircraft's pilot, as he despatched a missile which 'took out' one of the fighters, which, that is, its pilot, did not think much of this, as was true no less of his companion, who shot down the aircraft, thereby preventing the continuance of its passengers in the motion and action which, they felt, was the purpose of living.

It is apparent from our allegory, that concepts of life being action and motion are distinctly short-sighted. There is also and always the question of WHERE you go while you act, and WHAT you accomplish while you move. It is not only values and priorities, such as the passengers endorsed for the cabin-conduct, but direction and destination, for which these are good, or possibly bad, procedures en route.

There can be no destiny, other than that to which motion goes, and no point, other than action and motion, unless there is purpose for the flight in the first place. Moreover, it is not only a question of direction, North or South, translocation on this globe, but the purpose behind such direction, so that it has a point, a reason and an end in view, other than merely ending the motion. Again, the democracy is far superior to some braggart dictating his superficial flightiness, but its relative slowness which may be conjoined with relative sureness, is of little point if there is no concept of the end in view, or mere argumentation about it, without light or understanding, like rats scuffling, or bees in a dither.

Actually, bees tend not to dither, but apparently issue by such means as dances, purposes in view, such as getting food 1.2 kilometres due South-East, in whatever form they divulge discovered food supplies. But with men the question arises: What do you intend to do with the energy from the food ? In what direction do you intend to move ? And when some say this, It does not matter, just eat and act, then others may say, No, but I think it would be nice to destroy your buildings, and when asked why, they say, We are under command!

Now commands have their point. A doctor's orders are not without merit in many cases, and may prolong life or increase its energy; but for what ? A Parliament's commands, called law, may increase the peacefulness of its citizens, and ensure that there are many things they do not do, but for what purpose ? Is it, as in Victoria apparently at this time, that poor sunken State of spiritual incarceration as it in danger of becoming, to ensure that no one's feelings are ruffled in race, religion or major objectives ? so that even if you mean only well, your words if TAKEN TO BE offensive, may land you in prison. Is offensiveness then the last commandment of this last part of the Age ? Thou shalt not offend!

What however if it is offensive to the one who is told, Thou shalt not offend! because he/she feels that the offence taken is merely fraudulent, factitious, meretricious, a psychological pretence to gain money, or to evacuate it from your own person, in hope of reducing you to ruin in revenge, or sheer competitiveness ?

If nothing else performs such a task, the legal fees might do so, as incredibly but actually, the cost of assault by legal means on the part of the allegedly offended one, is apparently able in the Victorian case, to be borne by the State, whereas his or her appointed legal victim has to pay for defence. Paying lawyers is, it seems, a rather draining experience.

Naturally enough then, whether for reasons of principle, that the thing objected to was necessary for a good State, or for reasons of pocket, that the thing is offensively intrusive into due liberty of ideas and expression for good, the person deemed to be offensive might find his being thought offensive, itself to be contrary to his religion, values and priorities, and institute legal action. It seems there could be rather a lot of it, unless of course it is not permitted to find offensive the offensiveness of others who deem innocent meaning things offensive, and being offended, want it amended with lots of money and/or prison to teach just how important NOT being offensive, in their case at least, really is.

Here appears scope for negative directional dealing at a near to arbitrary level, whether or not sanctioned by some current cultural concept, raised to something nearing its epitome. Moslem states often do much the same, with people clamouring and claiming that some prophet has not had a square deal concerning things said about him, so that someone who thinks differently from this prophet would be better dead, and so is killed, if not by law, then by mob action. In this case, it is not just financial death, but physical, of course, so that the matter is taken, in practice, rather further, though there are keen and acute resemblances in principle.

It is difficult to make the purpose of living be to avoid offence. A mouse can be offended even at the presence of rats, especially so when the REASON for their being held offensive (that is, the rats) is not relevant. It is difficult to make the purpose of living, to live. You are always getting somewhere, in terms of enmity or friendship, towards all-embracive inoffensiveness, so that you believe and seek NOTHING but living on, so that others can tell the Captain in government what to do, and he does it; or other nations by war suggest to you, or by the threat of it, what to do or not to do, as in the Middle East.

There has, in short, to be a purpose FOR living other than just living, for action other than just acting, since direction is always implicit, and if not sought, can be imposed! Hitler did it, al Qaeda as if an heir, is seeking to do it, Islam in many nations and in alliances, is seeking to do it, and of course however evil these violences and dictatorial ways, they serve one good purpose. They show up the need to have purpose in life, as well as a stolid desire simply to continue living.

Direction and purpose for life are implicit in its exceedingly articulate commands in the DNA and in the genome, which provide a nice and relatively stable basis for the occupier of such equipment, to resolve how to use it. It does not keep dying or wandering about in an uncontrollable manner, since it is the subject of COMMAND in the DNA. Orders abound, taking up the equivalent of many hundreds of large volumes of text, telling everything just what to do, and by and large, it does it: cancer being one exception so notable that it has a bad name.

Towards what is man then directed, other than to simply existing ? Is a pen for existing ? is a pig for existing ? is a garden for existing ? is it made in order that it might exist ?

For what then does man exist ? Naturally there are many human opinions, as on the aircraft in our allegorical situations; and these often lead to war, and aircraft being shot down, with dismal deeds attending; and so strong is the sense of purpose, in such shootings, that sometimes humankind becomes human-unkind, although via DNA it still has a kind of format which is readily recognised.

In the plethora of competing purposes for life, then, death is often the way of it, such as millions of soldiers dead in World War I, and even since World War II, as in Iraq-Iran little differences within Islam, each believing in submission as is de rigueur in this matter, but having diverse concepts of WHO is to do the submitting, those submerging millions in the dust, as to their bodies, in an endeavour to ascertain the answer to this question.

It really does loom large in history. Someone wants someone else's land, or capital city, or wealth, or reputation, or leadership, or pride of life, or dominance, or predominance, and proceeds to take it. Again, someone thinks that someone else really needs, for religious reasons, to submit to their ministrations, as with the Taliban, and perhaps conceives further that women are largely for men, not so much persons, so that they really ought not to be seen very much, even if vitamin D lack resulting from all this cover-up, spoils their health.

This submission is a submission which one could not support, since it is arbitrary, unkind, cruel and thoughtless, submerging part of the race on grounds of physiology and the part taken in reproducing the race, to the dictates of others, who act as if theirs was the command of life, not the courtesy of occupying a place in it. There is a place for presidency, but not oppression. In Christianity the love of the wife is to be sacrificial on the part of the husband, having the sense of service implied in Christ's love of the Church. This gives to woman a place which feminism merely arrogates, and masculinism denies.

Yet what of purpose more generally ? What of predilection or even addiction to instituting purposes, one creature for another, and making it in some lethal way, obligatory if the other is to remain living, or suggesting this scenario, an increasingly common phenomenon in the world of men ? What then is the purpose ? Its necessity, always present, is thus focussed, not only by a pathological tendency to forget the issue, but by other pathological tendencies to arrogate it by force.

The question has been brought vigorously to the attention of those increasing finding delight in freedom without responsibility, liberty without love and sentiment without reality. They have been reminded by Hitler, and General Toyo, and by Idi Amin, and by Islamic hordes in the Sudan, or by Egypt via Nasser, as by more recent power braggarts that there are purposes in life; and that for man to forget his dimension, the direction of his dynamic and the point for his protoplasm does not excise it. Ignoring the clouds does not produce rain; and ignoring the rain, does not reduce floods. What is there has to be considered.

Ah but! say some, but, but, but don't you see that there is no end of all this purpose business, so we make it our business in a purposeless sort of way, to do what comes naturally, to try to adjust contrary claims and to negotiate everything.

First is that visibly what comes naturally ? Second, on what basis would you negotiate ? on the basis that purposes are useless ? If so, how is it not useless to try this sort of approach ? After all, it has its own purpose, which is to ignore truth, give it up, and making man master, see how he can continue to live for no particular reason, maximising his power to move and act without collision. That is in itself a purpose.

This blindness is not likely to lead to a lack of collision, as is the case with all blindness, when the particular things to which the person is blind, become operative. Ah well, say they, perhaps we can persuade man not to worry about things, and just to live! But the state of the world suggests that this approach is also, just blind. You do not so truncate truth and reality in the interests of convenience, since some find it convenient to occupy with this or that, the fields vacated, or even use them for a base for bombardment.

What things are to be excised from the human consciousness in the interests of maximising motion and action, then ? Why, WHERE and WHY we are going, WHERE we come from, WHERE we go to, WHY the equipment in our beings, so gloriously subservient to our purposes, was given and what is due to us to do with it, in terms of responsibility, what life is for! (cf. That Magnificent Rock, What is Life for ?).

Excellent, I say, it was all created at the same time. But what gives commands ? Why a commander!
And what is needed for command ? Why an articulator of propositions in a form and with functional correlation so that it is meaningfully inscribed; for if it is not meaningful, it is not a command but a noise. And what is needed for articulation of propositions to effect purpose ? Why a mind. And what is needed for the deployment of a mind ? why one understanding the usage of such an agency for purpose. And what is needed for purpose ? why a person. Very well, so there was immediate creation: we agree.

The next question is this one: WHY was it done! Ah, we do not know, they say. Suppose we LOOK! one suggests.

Past all the material inscribed with command, organised by procedures, there is what is not dependent on such things, since all such things require the Commander. In Him, if we are to be logical, there must be no written commands, only election, purpose and will to perform. If ever He were not there, nothing would ever be there, since there would be no reason for anything, so that unless you forsake reason, nothing would be there. You are I being here, that is not so, it is not the case that nothing is therre, manifestly, in a sort of noetic laboratory experiment.

Hence this non-material Being is there, and has always been there, for non-existence at any time means non-existence for all time, which is not the case. Hence this eternal Being is there, and commands. If there were several of these, they would need the institutor of the system in which they co-operate, or of themselves and of the system in concert, in which they inhered, so that there is therefore one from whom our systems proceed, who has commanded the substructure which we use, in making war and peace, in making plans and purposes, in differing and wounding, in issuing commands the one to the other, and annulling them, and then warring and killing, stealing and robbing, and becoming increasingly human-unkind instead of human-kind, begging the powers of asteroids and disease, want and earthquakes to shake us up into some kind of sense, which, under God as He predicted in Matthew 24, is PRECISELY what they are doing (cf. Answers to Questions Ch. 5, SMR Ch. 8).

We do other things on this earth, but when it comes to arson, fires are easier to light than buildings to build, and hatred is easier to ignite than love to find, and revenge is easier to indulge, that forbearance to weight; and ignorance and blindness, wilfully chosen, are easier to be given platitudinous names, than assured life in peace!

It is kind to confront madness, rather than to let it inure life to the point of destructive distraction; and when some millenia have been devoted to man's hearing the Gospel of the kind command of his Commander, and the result is an indifference verging on a fever of the brain, and a conceit verging on paranoia, and a naturalism^*1, as if the book wrote itself before it had been put there, and then inventing itself, put the words in too, despising reason and the Commander alike, veering towards the schizoid: what can you expect ?

Millions do not so self-destruct ? Very possibly, but their percentage is small, for when someone escapes the inane lure of naturalism, he finds the contrary command of invalid false prophets appealing; or the need to disdain all purpose overpowering, so that it becomes his purpose in stark self-contradiction; or the need to have peace at any price irresistible, and then they fight over this and that that concerns said peace, and the world whirs away on its action, motion program toward deserved disaster.

To be sure this too is predicted in phases (Matthew 24:35, Isaiah 51:6, Revelation 19-20, after 6), but that is only the external reminder. Internally, few find the path that is narrow enough to follow the Commander, and that is just what Christ declared (Matthew 7:15ff.). It is so.

Then arrives and flourishes brilliant idea of infiltrating churches - the USSR was marvellously clever at it when KGB personnel could even masquerade as clerics in the WCC, things becoming clearer in the post-Krushchev era, and they could deny the relevance of the supernatural, as in the PC of NZ when this author was a Minister in it (but not for much longer after that) in 1966, denouncing this sort of folly^*2 in Assembly, with predictable results. This is great for confusion, since it means that any ultimately purposeless government, intent on motion and action without meaning, has to deal with the 'churches', it simply asks those who have been infiltrated, having in some major cases now, homosexual confrontation with the God of the Bible^*3, delighting in the deplorable, sacking the Bible, just as they long had other means of confrontation with this Commander^*4, using a cover of a book for their own contents more and more, and they say whatever they want, in reply to the Government, which is most pleased. Increasingly, such think alike.

In this, such 'churches' proceed, assigning the Bible to the concept of resource book, but feeling very resourceful themselves, not finding much need for it.

For man, the only validated and verified book of COMMAND^*5 is thus by many disregarded, and yes, many believe it and follow it; but name ONE government which does! Enough said.

When therefore the Commander is countermanded by a confused democracy, or His commands are counterfeited in an elaborate work of unverified unreason, manifestly contrary to fact^*6, and then more and more of these factitious substitutes for reason and truth appear, oozing in and out of the actual validated and verified, well-tested and long checked command book, there is only one result.

The orderly becomes disorderly, the works of mutual benefit, turn swiftly to mere aggression, confrontation and callowly juvenile attitudes, the work of spuming flesh and fuming desire. The world grows short of food, of content, divisions arise and hate each other, clamour against each other, whatever God has said is more and more actively derided, often by means of reason which meanwhile ludicrously deems reason to have no validity itself, and the concertina of action and noise proceeds near to the unhallowed halls of hell. This is only a beginning of sorrows (cf. Matthew 24:7-8). Let us hear the word of Christ here.

That had to happen, for the Commander said it would, and in practical verifiable terms, ALWAYS what He says, in proper sequence, happens. There are simply no exceptions, and the same applies to the Old Testament, both in retrospective statements and predictions, and this exactly as God said would be the case (Isaiah 41:21-24):

God invites us to check His word, the book of the Lord (Isaiah 34:16), that Bible which pointed to Christ is confirmed by Him, and contains His confirmed further forecast. Indeed, t is checked these millenia,
and it is

In this way, command becomes as with a doctor, for good, not for invasion; and liberty becomes not for insurgency against God or each other, but for the expression of truth, love and kindness, all in place, the purpose of the aircraft if you will, its flight intention, its code of conduct, its destiny and its plan, all alike in place, with NOTHING MISSING. The Bible is also unique in this. It omits nothing, provides everything, and does not force, which would dump freedom, make God the author of sin, and grind the massive jaws of truth into oblivion; but rather does it draw, exhort, appeal, giving freedom its place under God, evil its condemnation and sin its guilty fibre.

It is important, therefore, to realise that there is command for the spirit of man, as well as for his body, the former allowed to roam inanely if it will, wisely if it will, the latter kept - considering the mutinies multitudinous of mankind - in marvellous condition for man's operation, like the aircraft in our allegory. It is the pilot, man, who is the problem.

These commands as John indicates (I John 5), are not grievous. Let us audit this.

This essence of this command ALONE, and its authority, then, is in accord with that faculty which God has given us, reason, so that a reason for the hope that is within us who are His, may be provided and meet all the requirements. One of these is to be found in scientific method, just to mention one aspect alone, as nothing else even begins to do (cf. SMR pp. 140ff., TMR Ch. 1, 8). This command ALONE looks over history as a teacher over his pupils, and it is all in order before it, not a hair out of place in any of the centuries. The command concerns Christ as the ONLY WAY, Christ as the site for the redemption in love, Christ as the site for authority, the focus of faith, the object of faith, the reward of faith, the power of salvation and the provided of command.

It is in Him that all is realised, fulfilled, and from Him that we find confirmed that unremitting authority of the book of the Lord, which prescribing His coming, is also prescribed by Him: Matthew 5:17-20, 24:35
(cf. SMR Appendix D). Small wonder that He NOT ONLY authorised His disciples to preach the Gospel to every creature, but to TEACH ALL THINGS WHATEVER HE COMMANDED (Matthew 28:19-20), for His mouth is not divorced from His deity, nor from His mission, nor is man divorced, who loves Him, from the mind of Christ, presented in such grace in such a place as accorded to Him, standing for all time (cf. Ephesians 1:10, Matthew 24:35).

What does not go, is man, in vast millions if not billions of cases, thus ensuring judgment, since mercy is despised (cf. Hebrews 10:29ff., 12).

This is sad, even deplorable; and yet, what is adorable is this, that at any time, man, not through some junta or not by some permission, ANY MAN may come to the Commander and repent and seek pardon, coming in faith to receive the commander's bounty, available because of the commands which He KEPT, when He came and DID THE JOB which man failed to do: ALWAYS doing what was commanded, and yet in a liberty so profound as to leave the world gaping, that He could and did agonise about doing the worst and first of His responsibilities, dying with sin of others, as a badge on Him, while accounted a criminal to those for whose sins He made Himself so freely available (Isaiah 53:4-12).

THAT sort of commander (Isaiah 55:4) is to be commended, admired, and that God is to be worshipped with heart, for having made the all but inexpressibly wonderful gift of liberty, He has provided the yet more kindling gift of love, and this done, with action FOR love TO SECURE redemption, He has provided man time to survey, to consider, and the world a whole in time, that many might find the God who created them, loved them and has paid for their restoration, as many as receive this same Christ.

He has done all of this to the glory of His name, that man WITH liberty might also be restored to blessed reality in Himself, from consorting with comrades of mind, spirit or body whose purpose is resentment not gratitude, or dominance not discretion, self-will and not finding freely the part created.

Thus restored and now in the very company of God, the purpose is found to love one another, after God Himself, then so to live that peace is filled with the joint purpose for all, of the Creator, and meaning is found in the diversity of vocations dowered (Romans 12, Ephesians 4), while authority is found in the Author, whose depth is our delight, whose splendour our wonder and whose constancy is our basis of loyalty, who never fails, whose love never dims, who resources are never restricted, whose creativity knows no limit, to know whom is a walk in wonder. Always His by creation, we then become His by regeneration (Titus 3:5ff.).

Thus turning to Him whose we are (John 1:12), we become His more deeply as we no more ponder or wander, but receive Him as He is in the way He has provided and follow Him whose fidelity is infinite (John 10:27-28, I John 3:1-9).

Then we become children of God, and live not in imaginary self-creation, but in the faithful and splendid aura of our Creator, the most delicious destiny conceivable. Cherishing one another with that concern that is enlightened with the understanding that God gives, with those common objectives which make it meaningful and apt, we realise the purpose of loving God beyond all, finding the felicity of His ways, discovering ever afresh, the depth of His counsel, the joy of His fellowship, the cordiality of His friendship.

But with many it is not so, whether by force of retarding will, desired thrill, selfish dynamic, auto-accolades, debased digression or any other of the contrivances of contempt, the riot of unreason, the paraphernalia of autonomy or the heritage of folly.

While disaster upon disaster strikes this world, because of the short shrift the spirits of millions are giving to the divine mercy of its Commander, as if, by comparison, the DNA became inveterately cancerous and congratulated itself meanwhile on such attainments - it looks for ever new ways of sidestepping the issue, ever new hopes despite inveterate failure of all hopes over all millenia, of finding the magical substitute for God.

It does not find what is not there; its temper disconsolate or aggressively intemperate, like a manic-depressive, drugging the while, as if this could restore peace or power, and utilising means of expressing love on the one hand, and securing reproduction on the other, as if this were a toy for the intemperate, a make-weight for the spiritually thin. In this, its only aid is Aids, which it spreads to others through its indulgence, its disregard of design, and its designs on the life given by the Designer, devastated increasingly by those spiritually seduced.

In the case of organic evolution, this seduction of spirit has become so ludicrous that it beats the comics for sheer fun. There is no mechanism, and yet it goes; there is no propulsive power for advance, and yet it advances; there is no information increment over the generations in principle and tested practice, and yet it increases; there is vast decrease of information and design over the ages, and yet it increases (cf. *1 below).

So sadly does mindless immorality squander mercy, and the aircraft which we have been considered from the outset ? one at a time over time, they crash. Instead, we look for passengers in the aircraft of Christ, which knows where it is going and why and with what and with whom: and entrance is free, as in Isaiah 55, with which we close.

*1 See News 44, Wake Up World! ... Chs. 4, 5, 6, Secular Myths and Sacred Truth ...
Chs. 7, 8, and Earth Spasm ... Chs. 1, 7 , TMR Chs. 1, 8, SMR Chs. 1 - 2.

The actual folly denounced was that of the failure to affirm the bodily resurrection of Christ, reasons and scripture provided IN ASSEMBLY in 1966, when the Assembly's Resurrection Statement was proposed, and FORMALLY condemned by this author as a Minister of the Presbyterian Church of NZ at that time, and an Assembly member. As the offending theological teacher in this NZ Church at that time, however, had also intimated that the supernatural was not a thing au fait with the needs of the 20th century man, it is apparent that the two are intimately related. Indeed, since the supernatural power of God is the issue, and the use of it, resurrecting the dead which Christ had Himself done in the cases of the son of the widow of Nain and of Lazarus most notoriously, after several days, is the application, the one clearly involves the other.

Having officially condemned that Assembly resurrection statement as apostate, unscriptural and anti-Christian, unreasonable and treasonable to Christ, the author did not find it necessary to say more, some 17000 words of testimony being FORMALLY presented to Assembly, as the law of the church permitted, to articulate the horror of which they stood guilty. The act of dissent from that notorious Statement was formal, public and in the presence of the entire Assembly. Following the failure of the Church to return to the word which revelation gives and reason demands, one changed to an American church in 1967, transferring in 3 days, in a sort of literary parallel to the deed on which one stood (Matthew 17:23), and for which one suffered such vilifying.

On the topic of reason and revelation as comrades, see above Ch. 1, but also Ch. 6, *2 and His Wounds Opened Eternity Epilogue. See also It Bubbles ... Ch. 9, Endnote 1A.

See also Tender Times for Timely Truth Ch. 2 for broad coverage of many other extremes from the biblical centre, to add to the ones here exposed; for it is a marvel of verification how the reason which comes with the image of God, allied to the imagination and perspective of spirit which is in us (cf. It Bubbles ... Ch. 9, Little Things Ch. 5, SMR pp. 348ff.), mirroring the majesty of God in its own way, constrains that it be rejected or fulfilled in the location and designation of the Bible as His, with no written competitors, His word. If it were not so, then reason would be less than might be expected in the image of God; yet it can merely find the word of God, not mind it or add to it, for that were blasphemy indeed, an arrogance of man beyond comprehension (cf. Proverbs 30:6). Neither can it subtract, for he who subtracts from the word of the commander IS the commander or a rebel, or else the commander is not in his due mind, a human condition not attributable to the One who lacks nothing, on whom all is founded and for whom our passage of time is a mere creation, for our universe.

Thus you find such scriptures as one might well expect in Revelation 22:11,18-19, with Deuteronomy 12, blasting into the pride of man like atomic bombs, but residing in the peace of God when the purity of the word of God is not tampered with by the art forms or artifices of man (cf. II Corinthians 4:1ff.).

When the exploring mind of man by the constraints of reason may find the presentation of the mind of God which tells him that he is in the image of God, and so equipped with rationality to name and think, and without excuse when ignoring Him and His ways (cf. Romans 1:17ff.): then is that holy harmony of the NATURE of man and the NATURE of God found; for the former being derivative and imaged from God, finds Him, and the latter having made man, becomes available. Test is due and proper (I Thessalonians 5:21-22); for it is not doubt which seeks to be sure of what God has said, but wisdom. Nevertheless, it is not wisdom which seeks an egregious departure from the clear teaching of the word of God, which is so clear that the sun resembles it in the heavens for unique conspicuousness, but doubt.

Cf. SMR pp. 683ff., 699, with News 121, 122, and Unity in index, Stepping Out for Christ Ch. 6,
Joy ... Ch. 2 .

See Ch. 4, *2 above, SMR Chs. 1, 3, Barbs, Arrows and Balms 6 -7, TMR Chs. 5, 7, Repent or Perish Ch. 7, Sparkling Life ... Ch. 4.

See More Marvels... Ch. 4, SMR pp. 1080ff., 65ff., and index. Cf. SMR pp. 68ff., 377ff., 1185ff..

Excursion on the Sovereign Majesty that Knows Man's Freedom,
and yet Knows what it is to be,
and says do in Advance with Fluent Ease

The whole tenor of the work and word of the prophets has a poise, confidence, and a penalty from those who could not gainsay or overturn the word of God through them - which frequently the nation simply did not WANT to follow, or the king, or both: it is something that is characteristic. Thus Jeremiah suffered abuse of person and body, even to the point of sinking in a stinking well, and requiring rescue with old rags to protect his arms from the rages of the nobles and the proud, who wanted to going on sinning as a nation, NOT be conquered by the enemy, and NOT have to listen to the reproofs and admonitions of the Lord.

This did NOTHING to reduce the power, impact or tenacity of his admonitions, as he delivered the word of God, and in fact the king himself, when things were becoming clearer to his detriment, came begging for help, bringing the prophet out of his confinement for the purpose. Jeremiah gave him a wonderful opportunity for deliverance, but lacking faith, the King did not take it. The terms and conditions were the same: REPENT and RETREAT from folly, and trust in the Lord and follow Him; or else find the judgment which folly makes inevitable.

WHEN, as Jeremiah had for so long predicted, and at that, done so with the extraordinary compassion of making various offers, including a last minute one JUST TO HONOUR THE DAY OF REST and avoid the toil of secular work on that day (Jeremiah 17:19ff.), the people yet did not obey, you see the combination of tenderness and truculence. There is no other way, and pity does not prevail to create a path for sin, but rather a way for return to the Lord. Without that, only judgment remained.

This marvellous offer, so simple and searching, alas, was one which was summarily ignored. Thus the anger of the Lord proceeded at that chronic, inveterate and impudent rebelliousness, including cruelty to one another; and imperiousness in the pursuit of sin continued, so that it could be covered, as it would, if by any means they had returned to the Lord. Indeed, if they HAD heeded, even then, the devastation and horror, yes the appalling tortures inflicted upon them by the invading Babylonians would have been avoided.

God knew this, and what He would do, and to Him the chaste beauty of love and judgment, mercy and appeal, with Himself the bearer of the sin burden for those who seek Him so that it might be removed from their own shoulders, in conjunction with prophecy on the one hand, and performance on the other, is a thing not difficult, since He knows all in advance, and has in fact wrought what will be with the knowledge that does not merely penetrate the future, but forms it, all things before Him as in space, so in time (cf. Predestination and Freewill Section III). Let us however return to the dealings with ancient Israel.

They would not heed at the beginning, in the middle or at the end, so that by the time of Ezekiel's word in Ch. 14, the situation was irrevocable, and both emphatically and dramatically so. It is necessary to realise the strength of the forces, the contrariety of prophet and people in these things, the confrontation and the result. If there was the slightest error, how the people would stomp on the prophetic restraint, but there never was, and they could only resort to violence when the prophetic appeals and corrections occurred.

Consider therefore this dénouement when rejected appeal was followed by finality in the judgment to come - and it DID come as you see in the Lamentations of Jeremiah, one of the most appalling exhibition of the needless suffering of chronic, intemperate rebellion you could ever with to see, unless at Auschwitz, for Israel even to that day had not repented.

Notice in this passage in Ezekiel 14, the three refrains of ultimate discipline coming: the best of saints could not prevent what was then to come to impenitent Jerusalem! In such a city, they would deliver only themselves; the rest of the people could not be so covered.

Imagine what the people would have done if THAT did not happen, and Jerusalem in any case had continued after the summary judgment was finally pronounced: the whole prophetic power would lapse. But the way of it was always one, entreaty, and if resistance should become chronic over time, sometimes a long time, and if revival, should it come, and thoughts of return lapsed, while evil resumed or grew worse, then perhaps after many exhortations and remonstrations, offers and challenges, practical and powerful, the time would come when the discipline would occur.

WHEN THEREFORE, it had all happened, and only a small remnant, residue of the people were left amid the ruins and their surrounds, and the Governor for Babylon had been murdered, such was the wantonry for so long in the land, the people were still amazingly full of their own thoughts and desires, almost as if nothing had happened in terms of pride and assertiveness, that they asked Jeremiah what they should do.

They assured him that it was only what the Lord would say that mattered (Jeremiah 42:5-6). The author had a similar experience in one pastorate, where this was the prior claim, but when the issue came from the word of God, it was NOT what it said, but what they wanted prevailed, and continuance in rebellion against the word of God was not an option for me. Rebellion can bear its own company. What however of Jeremiah in his ministry to Jerusalem, after it was duly destroyed ?

Jeremiah, then, told the remaining people NOT to go to Egypt, and that with good reason. Egypt ? it was there that Nebuchadnezzar was going, in order to subjugate that land also. If the Jewish remnant travelled there, they would only be, in effect, going from one tornado in their own land, to the next one in Egypt. But they refused this counsel from the Lord, and they told the prophet that the word of God had not come from him, arguing speciously to avoid the fact that Jeremiah had already been shown ONLY TOO RIGHT, since their city was in ruins. Accordingly, and fatally, even with their people in large numbers removed to Babylon, the remnant ignored the simple fact that the prophet Jeremiah had counselled them to follow the word of God in the first place, and they insisted on going to Egypt.

There, in Egypt, of course Nebuchadnezzar did come in his invasive furies; but our point here is this. Jeremiah at the instance of the Lord, told them to place stones in Tahpanhes, where they had proceeded, for there would the throne of Nebuchadnezzar be put. It is this practicality, persistence, flair, fearlessness, which is so impressive. It is no merely legal matter of words; it is thunderously clear, pointedly obvious to the eyes, dramatically incisive, and then done. If anything had not been done, which had been uttered in the name of the Lord, the death penalty was for the false prophet who would so say (Deuteronomy 18:20-22); but these were not of this kind.

As to the prophets of the Old Testament, again and again they suffered for truth, and truth was their warrant in the name of the Lord, and history their testimony.

Jeremiah in all this is of course a type of Christ, who WAS and is the truth, who told Jerusalem of its opportunity to take Him as its LORD in sacrificial atonement for sin, but in the main, they would not, no they would not come in faith to Him, were not willing as He summarily states both in Matthew 23:37ff., Luke 19:42ff., so that AS A RESULT, "your house will be left to you, desolate", and of course it was. That occurred in AD 70, with a Roman thoroughness which took stone from stone and salted the ground.

It is most pleasing to be able to observe that they had some 40 years in which to repent before THAT happened also, and in that time the apostles had presented near and far, the Gospel, to the rulers of Jerusalem as to others (cf. Acts 4, 5, 12), and the news had spread widely, with marvellous dealings from the Lord, including those through Paul, in successive and amazing testimony of many kinds (cf. Acts 13-16). Courage was as always needed, and clarity as piercing as a diamond drill (cf. Acts 4:17-22, 5:29-32).

Indeed, there is a majesty in the very concepts of divine diction resulting in particular prophetic pronouncements, apart from the performance. Look for example at Ezekiel 29:17ff.:

Not only does the LORD state what is to happen, He states WHY this is so, and can move whole nations in the performance of the judicious exhibition of His will, so that men might know that the very nations are like a drop in the bucket before His sovereign power (Isaiah 40:15). This is far from a lack of mercy, merely a preliminary, in that very chapter of Isaiah, to giving ground for seeking Him, so that those who seek the Lord will rise up like eagles, renewing their strength, when even young men will fail.

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^*A, 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^*B 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.

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.

Indeed, not from a soul unable to get beyond the 'unconscious' is truth to be found, for its very propounder by his own theory is so wrapped and tapped, so marred and scarred as all the rest, so that to what he consigns the race, he first of all must consign himself, making of his 'truth' an irrelevance by the dictates of his own model.

In fact, and incidentally^*C, the case is not other with Marx, for whom the social forces control the institutions and thought, making a regal progress by overwhelming power obtained from nowhere in particular, by laws and causes not bothering to have a source. If they so control others, they so first of all must control Marx, the model-maker himself, whose theories are but wisps of social imagination with unthinking background, even on his own deterministic delusion.

Darwin unhappily must join in the throng, for although he was most equivocal about God, in the end he sought a system not resting on Him, where designs proliferate past the power of man to imitate, but are the result of laws which come from nowhere in particular, and lack all orginality in themselves, while with no particular partnership letting loose sheer prodigies of design munificence in sudden spurts as in the Cambrian era by Gould's account (in his research-based account of this aspect, found in his work Wonderful Life): these design flushes coming as if absent-mindedly forgetting themselves, that on this model, they have no ground to be there. In the ground, however, they assuredly are.

Nor does Darwin himself as model-author in this fare any better than Marx or Freud, for if impulsions and propulsions and removals of what manages to come into and to form the universe's life, apparently while no one is looking, or at least thinking, are the content-container of the manufacture and implantation of man, then they are no more apt to find or able to produce the truth than any process or series of processes, which flatly works in a system. Happening is not understanding.

In fact, a system-analyst as part of a system is contained in its turmoil, not equipped to estimate its meaning, purpose or even its ultimate constitution, being himself assigned operationally on this model, by non-intelligence. Without being able to transcend the system so that it may be estimated without the limits of the forces within, and without the power of oversight which sees it is as it is outside both the limits and the constraints of a mere participant, our would-be analyst on this model is as inert as argon.

If you want reality to be found, then together with this ability to transcend, not merely be part of the system in which you are, for the truth concerning the system, you need something far more. Even on getting out of it all, so that you are not its mere butt, you need further equipment than mere translocation and ulterior displacement. You need with this, a power which is not limited by prejudice or lack of omniscience, lest there be events and actions beyond your very imagination, and far more, your analysis.

Thus to analyse a system of which you are by model assigned to be a PART, even if you get out of it, you need not merely to be evacuated from its controls, limits and thrusts, impelling, but to have access to an understanding correlative to its depth and magnitude, its finesse and its artistry, in which this world abounds. You need to see not as subjectively limited but as objectively informed from what does understand the whole scope of meaning and not merely affirm there is none, as if being equipped with so much meaning that it could be detected with your meaning-meter. That of course is precisely what is denied you in any such monistic system.

You need therefore a knowledge and understanding that lacks nothing in liberty or ability or agility.

On both counts, Darwin in his 'explanatory' system, has neither exit nor access, being ... just himself, propelled into being without intelligence and working in a system which is marvellous for the sheer volume of what it allegedly lacks, as Hoyle of Cambridge so well showed (cf. SMR pp. 211ff., 226ff., 252Eff., 422Eff.). In this marvel of wisdom, we are to deny what we find, do so with what has no source or origin for its work, achieve this as part of what lacks the quality we use in principle, and self-forgetful, then with wisdom inscrutable assign the income of the universe's life, to a lack of wisdom, and the meaning of its being, to our true meaning equipment, smuggled in from the days when God was believed in, before the model, for such as Darwin, but without import licence.

Hence Darwin's theories COULD not be true as an account of things. Thus, it is not merely the case that empirically this has been shown to be the actual fact, Gould laughing gloriously almost in giggles at the fact that the reality is design is DECREASING over the 'ages, (cf. Spiritual Refreshings... Ch. 6); but that this downfall of such a theory would have to come, this result was necessary and necessarily going to be negative.

Truth is nowhere to be found when there isn't any, least of all in the one who makes up such a model; and the model precludes the being equipped with the knowledge and understanding required, while confining the analyst, here Darwin, to its own conditioning. Darwin died twice: once in the flesh, the other, in his theories hot from the furnace of imagination.

It took a while. Man in his passions can be as slow as his temper can be fast and vast, killing a few millions here or there, while he wallows in unwisdom, imagining himself the crest, carrying in some inscrutable way, all before him, while knowing nothing of what made the ocean - wilfully.

It is a squalid performance of Marx, Darwin and Freud, to choose a system which lacks the ingredient they use in telling us the truth about things.

This type of model is one common to all three of these model-makers noted above, and to many more.

In fact, the system must have what it takes to produce what it is to be found, and yet never shows it;
the laws imagined for origination require what is adequate for their initial construction, since they merely exist and need origination better than the magic of mere clouded thought; and indeed they would fair better if their originative powers of advancing design were EVER seen.

Even if they were, their origin is not accounted for by a word. It needs what it takes to MAKE them.

Apart from all this, being bound to a system of either kind, where truth itself lacks, obviously removes all possibility of being right in what you say about its ultimate nature. Since as we have just seen, in addition the chosen 'means' are mere phrases, which do not incorporate in verbiage what is required in fact to invent, whether by laws or principles or system - first making all of those components and applying them, or else direct; and the theory is left barren of need to account for the prodigies of design and the effluvia of laws which adorn our universe: the case for any such model is a disaster like Hiroshima.

It only destroys itself; it builds nothing either logically or empirically. It is all simply defunct thought contradicting itself and all experimentation alike. Telling truth where there is assumed to be none is one of those miracles which atheists are so good at; but since it is a negative one, it doesn't get anywhere except in the degradation of human resources, through something far worse than spiritual entropy. It is quite starkly intellectual rebellion, which does not occur in vacuo, but in the domain of the human will. As to that will, it could not be further from a mere system, since distortion, dereliction and deviousness are no law, but mere effrontery against the truth. As always, the ultimate comes to the user of resources, not the manipulated means, and the invisible is where this lies. The passion for the visible has nothing to do with its operative power, but is in itself an illustration in terms of ultimacies in the realm of the invisible.

Revelation 6 tells us about the advent of such a season in history as it advances to its end with the return of the Maker in the form of the Man who is God, and showed Him at the prescribed date (cf. Highway of Holiness Ch. 4), and it declares the passion to kill that was to come and now is, intimated and addressed as if it were a distillate of the newspaper reports of the malady of mass murder in man, over the last decade or so!

Notes added to the above extract from Spiritual Refreshings Ch. 9, and hence
distinctively marked in alphabetical order. A and B in substance are part of this Ch. 9.

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.

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.

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.

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 ?

· 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.

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.

· 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.).

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.).

*C Here it may help some if we add an Appendix from Barbs, Arrows and Balms - IV.

THE AVIARY OF IDOLATRY

LIKE THE PRINT, IT IS ABSURD.

It is all a matter of preference instead of fact. The birds are made by man, wrought by his thoughts, they sit in the aviary, and of course, they do not fly.

We'll become more aware of this later.

Meanwhile, that is where we are in many dominant circles, like hobgoblins in academic and political - not to say, military - groupings. The world has gone mad with idols, and they exact an appalling toll. Ask any desolate, destitute kid in the Sudan, in Yugoslavia, any roiling, toiling peasant in Russia, where crime and distortion has made of "freedom" a risk factor comparable with absolutist power; and the "free" still ponder their idols, and say, Give me Communism, give me Capitalism in Moscow, but give me my wages! where the prisoners lack food and medical care, while wages lack and facilities fold (Time, June 15, 1998 ), where Orthodox Mass increasingly replaces massed parades, and wingless birds do not fly.

THE PERFORMANCE OF MANKIND

Why is there such an abased, abrasive performance from man to man! Why in the round more and more, at levels of power and performance, is there this insane emphasis on idols, that are to justify folly, embrace the young in their scorching hold, as did the literal, metallic idols of old, searing the flesh so that you could smell it (II Chronicles 33:6), as much as you smell nowadays, famine and desolation while guns roar and food vanishes!

It is all a question of what man is for; and in vast masses, mental morasses, they deem themselves fit for surviving. They do it by cunning in politics and often enough in churches, where phrases and assurances do NOT mean what they say, but continuance, existence, survival is what is 'OBVIOUSLY' necessary.

Such was not the case with Jesus Christ, who deemed survival a small thing compared with the execution of duty, the performance of sacrifice, the rescue of the perishing and the finding of the lost (Matthew 16:21-27). Even then, even Peter tried to stop Him (16:22), with whatever kindly motive. But it was not to be; for price is payable in full for sin, and He has His hand pierced in providing cover, now presented to seal with life, those deserving death; and God does seal with the Spirit those who are His (Ephesians 1:1-4).

As to power, that belongs to God as we have seen from the first, in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock; and to clasp it to himself, man falls into obscurity, as a lustful, vicious, marauding creature who would at worst seriously defile the name of beast; who, left to himself, arrogates a deity he does not have, a destiny he cannot create, and an assurance as without foundation as is the bottomless pit!

THE FOOLISH PHENOMENON OF INVENTING GODS

We considered in Ch.305ff., 294ff.), the foolish phenomenon of inventing gods, machining deities, populating the mind with its creations and then calling them gods, gods newly arrived, as Moses put it to his generation some thousands of years ago, involved in much the same thing, as seen in Deuteronomy 32:

"They provoked Him to jealousy with foreign gods;
With abominations they provoked Him to anger.

They sacrifice to demons, not to God,
To gods they did not know,
To new gods, new arrivals
That your fathers did not fear.

Of the Rock who begot you,
you are unmindful,
And have forgotten the God
who fathered you.

And when the Lord saw it,
He spurned them,
Because of the provocation of His sons and His daughters.

And He said, 'I will hide My face from them.
I will see what their end will be,
For they are a perverse generation,
Children in whom is no faith.

'They have provoked Me to jealousy by what is not God:
They have moved Me to anger by their foolish idols.
But I will provoke them to jealousy those who are not a nation.
I will move them to anger by a foolish nation.
For a fire is kindled in My anger,

'And shall burn to the lowest hell:
It shall consume the earth with her increase,

And set on fire the foundations of the mountains...'"

Thus does Deuteronomy 32 proceed, until it reaches the outpouring of His mercy on their desolation at the last, latter in the chapter, which should be studied rigorously, for from the first it has told the last.

Meanwhile, we are seeing it all over again. What the Jewish people asked for, they (at very long last) got; and what the Gentiles are seeking for, they are getting, now in full measure, so that the whole scope of the sovereign discipline of God is coming upon a world which is beginning to wonder what hit it! Setting on fire the foundation of the mountains does not now seem quite so superciliously poetic! It is divine judgment which is hitting the world, precisely as Jesus said:

"Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.
For indeed the days are coming in which they will say, 'Blessed are the barren, wombs that never bore, and breast which never nursed!'

They will begin to say to the mountains, 'Fall on us!' and to the hills, 'Cover us!" - Luke 23:28-30.

He proceeds to show the development in its earthy roots: "For if they do these things in the green wood, what will be done in the dry?"

It is now dry.

Matthew 24 (see SMR Ch.8) in great detail, with other passages noted in that exposition, shows how the Gentile world is to receive what it asks for, after very long delay, and a large series of processes outlined by the Lord. He is very patient and so often people seem to imagine that He is ineffectual, who is longsuffering, or impotent, who holds His power with restraint, but will judge, and that according to plan; as is happening with the most minute precision.

But let us return to our aviary.

THE BIRDS WHICH WOULD FLY IN THE AVIARY

1) There are the PERSONAL IDOL-BIRDS. These come from the perspiration of man, cultural, psychological, sociological, biological. Imagining many things which are never seen, never have the capacity to fly, they place them in the aviary, equipped with electronic voices, and programmed motions. They do not move much, for it is very hard; they do not ascend, because they are not alive, and the pretence is pretension. But they have them move about horizontally.

Their noise is raucous, their recordings are in fact hideous, like the shriek of cockatoos disturbed. They deliver songs of survival, praise for their makers and assaults on the builder of their masters, being earthy birds, birds which do not fly. They have model names like Freudian, Jungian, Adlerian, Darwinian, Punctuationist, Marxian, Nihilist, Idealist, Socialist, Communist, Communalist,Pragmatist, Existentialist, Babble-Babel and Bauble, Survivalist, but the performance of all models is much the same: they do not fly. They do not create; neither do they work nor have they worked, nor do they adequately describe what has worked. And there are many more, for the fingers of the artisans are busy, and the money is available for the time, to create what does not create.

They preach goodness, do evil, as far as lies in their programs; for their provisions are for enlightened self-interest, which they crow about constantly. If I do this for you, will you do that for me! is their cry. If you don't, I shall claw you and spoil you: this is their becoming song. Power-politics on a small or large scale, this is their little dance, which they do amongst the polluted dust at the bottom of the cage. They are programmed to "learn" what pays, to find what will make the least marks on their paper plumage. They say, "Excuse me!" and "By your leave!" whilst programmed to get what they can. Their foundation is distrust, and indeed their programs do not allow for trust; for their makers cannot fashion it at all. One reason is this, that their parameters are not trustworthy; it is all survival, no principles but power, not code but survival. This is called their "interests".

Their builders, idol-makers, have this principle: God was not very nice when He made things, but we are very nice! We are better in living than He was in creating. Thus we shall care for the sick, the lost and the lonely, and disbelieve in God, because, although He is there, since He likes to be believed in, we shall withhold belief, just as an estranged husband may withhold alimony, to "show her". Better than God, whom they slander or slight with callow caricature, they build on themselves and invent gods; and put them in plastic coats in their theological aviary. They like to keep them there, and oil them from time to time when their screeches are also grinding noises, as in the Sudan, and in China, and in India, and in Yugoslavia, as in the Palestinian show-down, as has been in Iraq and Iran, as in Tibet and East Timor.

It does not seem to occur to these idol-makers that their God built with better facilities than they possess, that in creation He was not operating by courtesy of the natural objects that they suppose, contrary to the testimony both of His word and His works (SMR Ch.2, That Magnificent Rock Ch.1, A Spiritual Potpourri, Chs. 1-9, Hebrews 11:1-4); and that He is not to be outdistanced by what He makes, repository of His own works, from His own being! (cf. SMR pp. 100-101 - *30, and *31; 88-99).

Better than God, they yet fall beneath their idols, which are really quite otherwise programmed; and do not work, for such things as goodness and honesty and truth, peace, sound justice, and the beauty of holiness are not to be found by mere thought. Their existence does not depend on scheming. These invisible entities are not found in matter; and it matters not at all what is done to matter (cf. It Bubbles... Ch. 9), it does not understand. Nor do they who follow it, as if they could force their desires and designs upon it; nor have they ever done so in history in their arrogant schemes; they do not succeed, nor can they.

2) Then there are the VICARIOUS IDOL-BIRDS. Here man sees that he is incapable of playing God, and the entire mental confusion of making your maker and having no one to make you. So he decides to go up one rung, in his mind. It is "Nature" which makes gods, and nature has made these birds. So man picks up pieces of living things, and moves about in snippets of their DNA to make new sorts of birds which, while they do not fly, at least are slightly unpredictable.

¨ “Nature made us!” they cry.

Although it neither stirs to life,

nor makes it,

neither is ever caught constructing DNA

nor does it develop morals,

having evidence neither of spirit nor of mind,

but only of the massive working of a mind it does not control,

does not possess and cannot produce:

yet "it's Nature which is the basis!",

irrationally, pretentiously,

in school and University, they screech.

¨ Like black cockatoos flocking

In horrendous crescendo.. . their artless song echoes brazenly,

A tumultuous tirade of noise.

So vicarious idolatry arises. Forces become manufacturers, action becomes thought and the grinding noises as men hammer each other, become creative. These birds, made by Nature, are then worshipped. They neither make nor create, but they are worshipped: a vicarious idol grouping, served in fevered imagination, by the many, like the animists of old; held to be the forces which matter, the things which move mountains, the ultimates and the great. 'Nature' is adorned with what it never uses, functions with what it has never shown, is possessed of what is never seen, is worshipped though it is without wit or wisdom, the mere repository of what it has neither effort nor capacity to create, does not create, is barren of means to create, a mental malady, a mixture of disparates conceived in death and born of fantasy. (Cf. SMR Chs. 1,2,10, and Index under Principles, Evolution, Thought, Language, Series, Creation.)

3) But then they go further: it develops at length into hilarious idolatry.
THERE ARE HILARIOUS IDOL-BIRDS.

Ceaselessly chattering, they never cruise, for they cannot fly.

They perceive that "Nature" had a beginning, that it does not build up, so they attribute it all to "Nothing". Nothing, defined as deficiency in toto, this did it! Wholesale inability performed; utter non-existence, why this is the REAL force, the TRUE basis! It is gala day for man, a giant leap forward in thought is this after-thought... What has no force is the force; what is not there to create, it is this which created. What better expression of the long-standing divine characterisation of it all in Romans 1:18-22. This is "very deep" and fit only for the cognoscenti; but it is a just and grave mockery of the vicarious idolatry which preceded it; and besides, it is very amusing, if poignantly, this nervous-breakdown of unbelief.

But God is not mocked. The world reels in its unenlightened self-interest, its bogus creativities, and it is furious at its own incapacities, and resolves to try harder, filling its idol aviary with ever new 'gods', new-born gods, freshly fathered and feathered from the imagination which God constructed for man, when He made matter, mind and spirit, and made of man a trilogy, fathered from His Trinity (SMR Chs. 1-2, 10).

PRINCIPLES OF NON-FLIGHT

While this proceeds, the screeching in the aviary is all but unbelievable; but they call it music, realism and such like things, to make the pain less.

Yet God proceeds. His zealous insistence on truth, like the jealousy of a man for his bride, is not dimmed by more lies. While He has been patient, the thing must come to an end, as He has described so often in Isaiah, declared in Moses and manifested in the words of the apostles. It is not a playground (Cf. II Peter 2, Isaiah 51:6, 65-66, Psalm 102, Deuteronomy 30-33).

"Have I not told you from that time, and declared it?
Is here a God besides Me?
Indeed there is no other Rock:

I know not one.

{Has Rome not learned to read - cf. Psalm 18:31, or does it assess that it knows more than God, in that idol-type!}

"Those who make an image, all of them are useless,
And their precious things shall not profit:
They are their own witnesses:

They neither see nor know, that they may be ashamed,
Who would form a god or mould an image
That profits him nothing..." (Isaiah 44:8-10).

Provisions for ... the few, who could hide it out while the mountains, with nuclear aid, might toss about above. Underground in the scope of things?

Again, He says,

"A deceived heart has turned him aside;
And he cannot deliver his soul,
Nor say, "is there not a lie in my right hand?" (from Isaiah 44:20).

"You," He says, "are My witnesses, and My servant whom I have chosen,
That you may know and believe Me,
And understand that I am He.

Before Me there was no God formed,
Nor shall there be after Me.

I, even I, am the LORD,
And besides Me there is no Saviour" - Isaiah 43:10.

Better than God? More ethical, more noble, more caring than the Lord! Show it! Their works are without power, without purity and without truth. Man is not so made and cannot so be re-made.

Yet they try, and pour money into nations or continents as in post-World War II Marshall Aid; they form, but they do not reform. Mercy is not wrong, but false hope is so.

God is not mocked, though with their "potent" idols, they try it like foolish adolescents in some abominable school, erected without foundation and without truth, in a mythical profusion of mental confusion which results in louts, stylish louts, cool louts, but selfish louts, who rejoice in their sophistication ... louts, interested in enlightenment so long as it survives, and they with it, and as handsomely as possible, or as surely; for their 'faith' is in themselves, and in their idols, which screech in cages, cages full of idols, personal idols, vicarious idols or hilarious idols, which have neither heart nor conscience, neither minds nor spirits.

This sunken generation is considering going underground altogether, into the earth, so that they could be safe from the heavens: an aviary underground, where non-flight is not so humiliating, to form an alliance of peace, where soulless lives and heartless minds may construe in the dark, what shall be next. They almost did it literally in Moscow in its huge underground

It is not necessary. It is not effectual in the end, but how it mirrors the predictions already, as the day merely begins to draw near, even from very long ago! (Luke 23:28ff., Revelation 6:16-17, Isaiah 2:10-19). . What shall be next is judgment!

THE FLIGHT OF THE SAVED IN THE STRENGTH OF THE SON

Meanwhile, the salvation of the Lord is unchanged (see Item 17 above). It is still true, while it is yet day (for the night is coming in which no man can work - John 9:4), that "whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved" (Acts 2:17-38), and that Christ is the door through which a person may enter

and be saved assuredly and for ever (John 10:9,27-28); that His flesh is meat indeed through the faith-reception of which is life eternal (John 6:50-62, Matthew 20:28, Galatians 3:1-13), and that He as the Lamb of God was sacrificed, though He is now in heaven awaiting the time of His return to perform very just judgment (Acts 3:19-22, Hebrews 9:25ff., Matthew 24:24-29). Though those words of "eating" be spirit and life (John 6:60ff.), not matters for gnawing, neither are they matters for ignoring (John 1:12-14, 3:17-19,32-36).

HIS DEATH for sin, as a sufficient and seemly sacrifice for it, is still as available as at Calvary. There to the thief - eyes opening at last so that he saw Him (John 6:40), and seeing believed, Christ declared: "TODAY, you will be with Me in paradise!" (Luke 23:43). "WHEN" you come into your kingdom, said the thief, remember me. WHEN! Was there unknown horror and certain desolation coming to this dying thief, on the threshold of biological death and the quivers at eternity?

Not at all. Faith is not like that. God is not like that! TODAY, replied the Lord, covering the case put: TODAY, you will be with Me in paradise; for the work was finished (John 19:30), and there were those of the apostles who would see Him coming in His kingdom, without FIRST TASTING DEATH (Luke 9:27). THAT assurance to the thief was the fierce contrast with the failure of man through sin, that that very day, in the face of such misused force, the realities of faith would be unveiled: for as Paul says,

"God has not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation, that whether we wake or sleep,
so we should ever be with the Lord"(from I Thessalonians 5:9-10).

The flight of faith in the SIGHT of fact and the LIGHT of the Lord is what is needed, faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, the only available salvation, the only attested and verified salvation, the only predicted salvation, the only universal salvation, though they be few enough who partake of its universal offer and who will be saved (John 3:16-19, Isaiah 43:10, Acts 4:11-12, Galatians 1:6-9, Daniel 7:14).

And the dirt of the birds attests, they are no birds of paradise. Freedom is not created by man: either by Communism's inhuman fiasco, or by the burning as of liberty's pure light, from the political image of freedom; for the image is defiled without the One who created freedom. Liberty is found only in the Lord (John 8:30-31), and the world is increasingly clearly under sentence, and cannot find liberty, but only loss, in the end, of the life of the soul in its final dis-repose with its screeching idols.

COME! It is time to seek the Lord:

"Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts,
And let him return to the Lord,
And He will have mercy on him;
And to our God,
For He will abundantly pardon" - Isaiah 55:7.

"Seek the Lord while He may be found,
Call upon while He is near" - 55:6.

Soon there will be no more time;
and always, there is no other God.

Incomparable in majesty, He is unmatched in compassion, infinite in understanding and despises mean spirited self-interest, once for all showing the way in the sacrifice of the Cross, the obedience to death of His sent Son, the only Saviour, for whom nothing was too much trouble, and no trouble was nothing (cf. Isaiah 42:1-4). It is that, or the AVIARY OF IDOLATRY, where there are ONLY very foolish birds, programmed in the end, by the lost.

(Cf. Matthew 25:1-13, 31-46. For further on idolatries, see That Magnificent Rock, Ch.6, and 7, and SMR pp. 842-884. )

	1) unique in being so testable, in principle,
	2) unique in being so munificently testable not in odd spots, but in vast tracts of time and place, in practice,
	3) unique in being testable concerning things past and future, prediction and retrodiction, in a systematic manner, with a chronological versatility to profound as to make grounds for independent claim within itself, with this fact in view, that men should believe Him who so speaks (Isaiah 41, 48),
	4) unique in providing comprehensive comprehensibility concerning all things (cf. SMR Ch. 5, Tender Times for Timely Truth Ch. 11, Ancient Words ... Ch. 7, Lord ... Ch. 6), and resolving all systematic problems, giving light for reason and life for man,
	5) unique in being incapable of being shown wrong in these matters^{6, 5}, despite the concerted efforts over millenia of myriads who hate it and the God behind it, or seek to liberate themselves for deeds unthinkable, by disdaining all authority,
	6) unique in making detailed predictions, both of trend and specifics, so minutely, adroitly, summarily and with such verifiable perspective, that only God could know, and thus control history to such a precise and unwaveringly total fashion, while preserving human freedom^*7, or in any other way.
	7) unique in correctly forecasting man's desire to escape the knowledge of past judgments and coming divine action alike (II Peter 3:3-5, cf. Joyful Jottings 8),
	8) unique in providing a remedy for man's angry irrationalities and inane misconceptions, wrought by sin, and so providing remedy for sin, and meaning for continued human existence, rather than ground for its cessation (Psalm 50:21ff., Romans 1:17ff., Isaiah 45:19ff.),
	9) unique in providing justice for man, and in love both securing justice ON HIM, and providing kindness TO HIM (Galatians 3, Romans 3, 5), without losing any principle, whether of peace or truth or justice, or mercy, all of these things being provided in a systematic way, by an act of coverage so costly, that it bestows on man the significance which he feels, but not because of anything he has done, rather because of the love of the Commander, Christ, for him.
	10) unique in signalling in hundreds of specialised references, the coming of the Remedy, the Redeemer (cf. *Joyful Jottings* 22-25, *Heart and Soul…, Tower of Truth* Chs. 7 - 8), exposing Him to countless tests in a human format, while abiding in the identity of deity, the mode of death, the date of it (Highway of Holiness Ch. 4): and proceeding to the fact of resurrection, the Gospel from it (cf. SMR pp. 755ff.), its world-circling power and provision as foretold, in the form foretold, having divinely countenanced the suffering of the sin-burden, that adopted 'child' of God, which He suffered His own only-begotten Son to bear (Luke 24, Hebrews 2, 5:7), that man might, out of love, be placed outside the penalties of guilt, in justice and in life.

	Neither can meaningless 'chance', mere lack of purpose in a given system beyond what it is artlessly doing (cf. Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Chs. 9, 13), with no more power to create than the system to which it refers,
	nor can groundless laws 'lead to' anything deemed to 'arise' in this most unscientific of methodologies. You need creativity, not the dull pounding of laws already made, to which nature conforms (even when these are corrected asserted, not romantically imagined). You also need the source of the laws themselves, null though their creativity is shown to be. In some ways, and the matter has all the girth and worth of mirth, it is like imagining that Parliamentary law is what made the legislators, and that they do not need to legislate since the laws keep on making themselves ... and more legislators. Is this perhaps the very height and acme of the automatic mode of thinking, as if a machine shop were to make gears by imagination, automatic in kind, and then send out the vacuous car with all good wishes, since the very creation is itself automatic! The impersonal fallacy of persons who reduce themselves to a world without understanding, destroy their very equipment by which they argue in arcane and inert models, then use it to tell us all about truth: this is one of the most destructive this world has ever known; and it is quite natural that it should be destroying itself on such a basis, since truth ignored is not intimidated by such intimations. Think amiss, and you find the power of fact soon at your throat. There are many throats in this world, and they are being reduced with passionate and murderous skill with the ingredients not least, of godless imaginings which make so much of man, that heady, he seeks for a glory which is mere inanity. It is not so much the politicians who are to blame, as the culture which ferments their inglorious notions.
	If there are exceptions, it is this which is their post. In what country is theirs the control!