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CHAPTER 3

SCALING THE HEIGHTS AND ENTERING THE STRONGHOLD

An Imaginary Dialogue on a Real Issue

It is not simply a matter of scaling the heights, I said, for you have to find the door.

I know that, he said.

He always knew; perhaps if I told him of writing my autobiography, before it was done, he would reply, I know that!

It was of the nature of the case that he knew, he always knew.

He was not young, being at least four score and ten in the age stakes, but had kept his wits remarkably well. He could handle his affairs with distinction, did not think much of this computer stuff, could deal with things financial with the judicious pen, with the thoughtful awareness of the many frauds he had seen people try to commit, steered diligently to avoid these, and writing with his elegant script, meant every letter to be what it was, and not to be in line for an electronic break-down, or up, or mutation, or transmutation, by this means or that. They could have all the viruses on earth for all he cared; they never entered his carefully maintained, personally written log books.

You know, he confided, when you look up at the height of the thing ...

I knew, since we often discussed such things, that his intent was now spiritual ...

There is always a sense of the overwhelming, but it is just a matter, simply a matter, as in all else, of keeping your wits about you, striding in like Caesar, veni, vidi, vici, and all that, and finding how it goes and moving where you wish to go. If you need help here or there, in the process, then find it, judiciously use it, and get to your target.

He had been in the Army in World War II, and had been quite distinguished, yet never rose above Captain, since he had both a mind and a will of his own, and without being insubordinate directly, he could find his ... ways, and thus sought to be  limiting things to acceptable domains.

Action was his watchword, execution his strong point, performance his criterion, production his warrant. WHAT precisely he produced, seemed to be a point of such vagueness; WHY he produced and how it related to what it ought to be, this seemed prematurely grey, and had been since his youth.

Still, there he was, looking upward, and noting that it seemed to stretch up and up, looming, soaring, impregnable and yet ... it had a door, it had to have, he was sure of it.

Now the reader, not having been present in our former conversations, might not yet fully understand in what sense something spiritual may be said to be stretching up and up, impregnable in appearance, soaring unscalable, yet having a door.

In my own view, the door part was the fruit of his imbibing the seed of the word of God, when he was young, for his mother had been particularly diligent in imparting it to him, though later he confessedly simply found it inconvenient.

At all events, there he was, for once looking up and finding these spiritual realities a matter of soaring ...

In fact, he continued, it soars like a bird, shoots upward like some vast castle, constructed over hundreds of years, uninviting except to enter for the sheer majesty of it.

You mean, I thought it judicious to insert, that God is infinite.

Oh, you could put it that way, I suppose, he divulged, but the thing I perceive is this. There has to be a source of our order, organisation, construction and power to construct, of our imagination and our spirits, the mind you know. These things never happen easily, and are as full of pitfalls as a brood and breed of vipers, when you want to come near to them. The thought that what was not there put itself there, is sheer madness, and the thought that something was always there is as mad, unless you see that it was ... well adequate.

I was so impressed with this that I could not help wondering if he had been reading some of my books.

God, he said, some sort of a God, must be there, must always have been, for these things do not 'arise', nothing does, you have to work for it. It's either that or nothing, and we are not nothing.

But he goes up - the small 'he' was a testimony here to his feeling that he himself was perfectly adequate, even in this domain, this realm - and up, he continued, so much that it is well... almost awesome.

It would be good, then, I mused for him, to enter that castle ?

It is the source of power and meaning, obviously, he replied, and it is imperative to know how it does what it does, and why, I should think. It is no good having potential competitors, always a threat, without really understanding them.

So you expect to find the door ?

I have to admit, he replied, frankly, that I do not even know the name of the place.

God, he said, you are supposed to know something about this side of things, what is his number ?

You could tell that it was once again, a small 'g' in god, because of his intonation: it was very much an affair of naming another business, one like his but much, oh so much bigger.

I could not help reflecting that in one sense he was right: not ontologically of course, for God is infinite, without any bounds or limits IMPOSED on Him, since none is there to do it, and He is free, with that freedom that birds suggest (but do not have), relative to ourselves, as they pick out some particularly succulent looking cliff, in some recherché place of delight, and without the least apparent quiver or tremor, soar there in a matter of 40 seconds flat, and alight as if there were nothing in the least a problem in overflying a virtual crevasse, and alighting in a superb situation that would take days of danger to scale.

Birds ? they have it, although of course, their lives are not usually so long, and they may not fully appreciate what they have.

In that, there is some resemblance to man, in fact. I interrupted my thoughts, thus evoked, however, since after all this WAS a conversation.  I paused to share this thought with my companion.

What is the number of that bird ? I counter-queried.

Number ? he declared, after some apparently weighty thought which compared unfavourably for grace with the motion of the bird which we had been evoking.

Number ? he proceeded as his thought presumably clarified. It does not have a number, though I suppose if you knew enough about it, its parameters, mental and physical, their conjunction, and what I think you call its 'ectype', its essential and unitary nature, allied to its purpose ...

Purpose! I interrupted. Now you are talking. And how does it have a unitary purpose ?

Why of course from the god who made it.

He had a flair, at times, for being far wiser than the normal humanist or spiritual alienist, whose life was one long battle against truth. At times, in narrow glimpses, you could almost think that he could see.

Then if it were a number, and this is of course metaphorical, I continued ...

Oh, forget the baloney, and if you want to say ...

As I do, I re-interrupted, that the purpose being one, distinctive, and necessary, for its being what it is, one bird with one total, overall, comprehensive being-power, what I would call its unmultipliable simplicity, which is more vital, more crucial than its irreducible complexity, this is the nearest you get to its 'number'.

In other words, he mused, you are saying it like this: the bird has ONE thing which is singular, other than its obvious design, that is - what it is. Its purposive nature is its essence, and this is its mode of contribution to the universe, its ectype.

You could put it like that, I suppose, one allowed.

Well, what is the purpose of god, then ? he pursued the point. It was his nature to pursue a point, whether to sacrifice some competitor in a price war, or to go in and out of this or that line of business, with resolve and decision, as the case might seem to indicate, or require.

It is to be what He is, I replied, for some questions deserve the answers which they get.

And what is He ? he replied, this time the 'H' as a capital coming close to awesome in its intonation, and so betraying it to the ear.

He is simply the Creator of all things, eternal, immiscible, independent ...

Ah! I like that, he said, far too much inter-dependence going on now.

I ignored this, and pursued my theme ... He is in short unconstrained by any force, name or culture, and His own name is autonomous.

Well, that does not say much, he rejoined.

IF YOU, I pursued the theme for my own part, were like that, I am quite sure you would love it.

Very possibly, he said, very possibly.

So it is not nothing at all, but the very basis of everything, and that, my companion, is precisely why as you were so wisely saying, it goes up and up, never ending ...

 I did not precisely say that ...

Perhaps not, but it was apparent from a studied observation of your words, their tone and your posture of presentation, that this was in your mind.

I suppose it was, he replied with just that degree of concession which to those who dealt with him in business, was one of his chief draws - he knew when to draw the line and not proceed, at least for the time being.

This indeed on this occasion seemed to stir him, so he went on ...

Up and up, indeed it goes, like a vast, imposing, imperial castle, but there must be a door. I mean, it is not like Aristotle's god, some kind of shut-in, for after all, you need more than a first cause for things, you need a first cause for the very idea of serial causation, the invention of our kind of situation and system,  where this does this because of that, and that does it because of a dozen other things, and they all take TIME, and interact, but not so as to destroy their ectypes, spirit. This,  I suppose you could say when it comes to our own level as man. It is a system, and systems do not write themselves either into books or nooks.

This remarkable approach to eloquence was impressive because rare -- he might usually be asking why bother - but on the other hand, as to the ideas, I began to have a very strong feeling he must have read some of my SMR. After all, he had long known I had written it.

When however I look, he continued his thrust, I never find anything nearly big enough to be called an entrance: I mean, not to a castle like that.

You are tall, I conceded, but what sort of height do you find for any form of access to this castle of yours ?

About 6 inches - I mean, it might simply be a shadow, but as I look at it, there is always, and of course there has to be, some sort of involvement with a point, plane, surface or situation where action occurs with what is not in the castle.

Perhaps you could grow shorter ?

No.

Or stoop ?

It would crack my back.

Mm. Shrinking ?

I have no intention to be anything or anyone other than what I am, thank you very much.

Ah! then there is a problem of sufficient magnitude to be the cause, and contain the place of solution, for your problem.

You think so ? Explain.

This may have been the second or third time, such a demand had been issued from him in my life, but there it was, so I seized it by both horns.

IF you are to remain what YOU are, and God is to remain what HE is - and there is no room for change there, since He always has been, has always known all about what He made, and is unimpressible by any developments, and having invented our sort of causal system, in time, as you were just explaining, is not even subjectible to its temporal and temporary limitations, then something follows.

What is that ?

It is YOU are the one who must change.

I guess there is no way we can change that.

Now there are only two basic considerations left. Either you change in a way detrimental to your spirit, or in a way explanatory and consummatory of it.

I can see that.

To achieve an entrance to this castle ... and oh by the way, did you notice the great moat around
it ?

Yes, I think I did see something like that.

That is for what falls either because it tried in vain to enter where no door was, or by not fitting the door frame, or did not want to enter anyway.

Yes, I can see that too. Not everyone wants to do business with another business, and if the business goes by the name of God, there will be many failures.

The failures in fact are not because the door is not there, or because the abyss is, for the moat is really on a scale proportionate to the castle's own, but because they do not want to do business in the way the castle, in fact, God Himself, will have it.

Very imperious of Him, I must say.

Yet in your own business, whoever told YOU what to do and how to do it.

Oh well, there are certain market forces and money powers, but I never let them dictate, for there is always a way of finding them out.

Before he could particularise, I therefore pressed on with the answer to his question, with that cardinal word, 'explain' attached.

YOU never let them dictate, for there is always a way ?

Well, that how I found it, they are only other men and so forth.

But God is not only other men, and so forth. He is the Creator, and there is no comparison; in fact in your comparison, you show precisely WHY the case is incomparable.

Yes, I can see that, he said for the third time, which was probably a world record in our conversations.

So you have to find out the way as HE defines it. There is a door, and the world has been told of it from the arising and falling of man, that little up and down, a matter of a very short space of time! Made ABLE to communicate with the castle, man soon lost that power, being proud in his intemperance, vexatious in his pride, lustful in his desires for autonomy, and obsessed with his state and power.

There're all like that, ultimately I suppose, he conceded.

And if 'all' includes you ?

I confess I have never had time to reflect much on that point.

What if you were to concede your illusory autonomy (you cannot even remake your genes), and accept his ?

Well it's obvious that has to be done, but I must say it looks unhealthily dangerous. If one were to do that, how could one be sure of maintaining one's rights and position. If the head goes, the body is someone else's to prey on.

This is most true, if that motive be assumed.

What other motive could there possibly be ?

Even you ... and as I said this, I instantly realised the mistake I was making, for it is God who convicts of sin, the Holy Spirit as in John 16, and not I. Quickly I sought another beginning ...

You yourself, now, I proceeded, have moments of generosity, real concern that this or that grandchild should have this or that, and while it may be the 'honour of the family' or something else, is this not for the WHOLE reason for such feelings, an over-simplification. Do you not at times feel a kind of affection, fellowship, almost brotherliness to SOME others, and do you not act, at some little sacrifice, for their welfare with joy ?

Yes, I suppose you could put it like that.

Well, WHY suppose, just as a simplification, that God is without such kindness towards any of His own creation.

Point scored for you.

This is a most rare concession, let me share with the reader, and not one to exploit.

In short, why imagine that He who has ALL He COULD want and makes ALL He wishes, and can remove it at a word, would have a narrow desire to defraud, frustrate, grab, steal ? That is anthropomorphism with a vengeance, pathological anthropomorphism at that, building the idea and conception of God on what is the basest and most evil side of man, one which leads to wars innumerable, sufferings all but inconceivable, and madnesses which after the battles are over, are often considered as incomprehensible. It isn't really, though, since it is simply sin at work, fraud and falsity in the mind leading to ANYTHING that it takes.

You could put it like this, in a way, I continued: that this desire to be found in man, which is to take over and assume complete power over man, is simply an application of his UNWILLINGNESS to be taken over by that very God who made him. He is going to lord it over people, instead of lauding the Lord.

Clever, I must say.

But God is cleverer than man: since man's cleverness is merely an image, God's is the original as Creator.

God has no NEED of such things, and if He LACKED something so that He COULD need such things from what He had made, then the one in view, properly in this case, called just a 'god', would merely be a part of creation. Hence in that case,  we find we are no longer talking about God, but just about one of those endless things men make when they fall from Him, whose the castle is, and in the abyss of thought - for ideas have their abysses too - machinate away, frustrated, fraudulent, empty and ruined.

You seem to be discussing the history of philosophy and in large measure, I suppose, this is precisely what it does!

It is also the history of religions that man makes.

It is also, I pursued the point,  the reason why it IS safe to be changed so that you can enter that door.

I have often thought of entering it. But how can I KNOW, I mean is there any contract, that I will be ... well, safe. In order to negotiate, I would want to have an absolute assurance of the outcome.

You have that: God is good.

But suppose His opinion of me is not good, that is, in His estimation - you know, teachers in my day, they used to be like that, they thought this and that of you, and that was that - I do not rate too well. What is the good of that ? If HIS decision is to be final, which obviously, now I come to think of it, it must, then I need to know something about it in advance before committing myself.

This is obtainable on one condition.

What then is that ?

It is this. You simply have to trust Him.

I ... can do that, but this does not tell me in advance what He will make of me, what position assign, what portion give and so on.

This is true, except for some basic qualifications. You do not, to be sure, know what He will make of you, but since His will for those who are not in the abyss, actually or in prospect, since He knows all, is good, and He is good, then whatever He makes of you will be good.

Small comfort in that. I have not spent all my life making of myself what I think right - though perhaps not always by any means in terms of what you in particular would call right, mm! in order to be unmade, remade and re-assigned according to what somebody else thinks.

Most understandable, I responded. However when not somebody else, but your Creator, without whom you would not even have existence, far less the power to imagine, contrary to fact, that you are autonomous which your remarks imply as your pre-condition, when HE is involved, then the situation changes. I admit it is ONLY then, for otherwise, I could concede that some other mere and ordinary person could never have such a power over you. That would be madness, for his or her powers are so limited that it would be sheer lunacy to give such unlimited power to such a limited person.

How does the situation change then ?

You become then a matter of immersion in goodness, re-emergence in graciousness, achievement this time, as at your very birth, not from something you perform, but which HE does.

I need something rather more than that.

The immersion is like that of the Israelites at the Red Sea Crossing - a matter at most of the sprinkling of a few drops, carried by the wind, for they went over dry: that was their 'baptism' as Paul calls it in I Corinthians 10, and it was into Moses, he says. But now we have a baptism, as in I Corinthians 12:13, directly into Christ, more than which no one could ask, and His care and His concern for us is as if it were His own body, placing all things in order in the end, when the trial is over.

So the re-emergence after being rebuilt is divinely apt, accurate and good ?

You have it. You have your something more. This God, whose the castle is, rising impenetrable, except by permission, interminable in altitude, impregnable in purity, all deceits and deviousnesses outcast, where the misuse of human will is either atoned for or outcast to the abyss, He has acted. It is ONLY for that reason that there IS a door, even it is, freely admissible this fact, very low.

I do not like low doors, have always tended to hit my head on them.

In this case, as in any business, it is altogether what one likes ...

Well, where is the door anyway. I have been looking in case there is a better entry possible, where I might carry over the threshold - I presume it has one - my belongings and the essence of who I am.

The door, as one would have thought you would know, is Jesus Christ.

HOW, precisely ?

SIN is the barrier, God's generosity being without limit, creation being merely one of its evidences, but He went far further than that.

How ?

He decided to sentence Himself as a vicarious sacrifice.

What, precisely, if anything, does that mean ?

It means that the Father's heart was so strong for His offspring - metaphorically, I mean His creations in the format where they can even talk meaningfully about him -

Yes, I know what you mean there.

It was so strong that He decided to take action for their welfare. He knew this before time, that temporary and temporising creation of his, of course; but He performed His resolve in time. In one sense, the Lamb was slain before the foundation of the world as Revelation with Ephesians 1:4 imparts; but in another, it had to be DONE, and when things you have THOUGHT become things you must DO, that can for us at least, be a very different thing.

It is indeed. You feel and weigh it all up, look about you, consider other options to the last, usually...

But He having weighed it, simply did it, as you see at Gethsemane. He did this since He knew other options to be zero, for sin is no good in that castle, for otherwise its very impregnability would simply make of it hell, a place where the irremediable lived for ever! and so it was simple.

How remove sin ? I pursued the point.  First, pay for it, for justice is at the root of all felicity; then cover it aptly, for accuracy is necessary in all bliss, fuzziness a mere failure. How cover it ? Only one way, pay for it AS a man, then there would neither be outcry justly possible, nor impact inadequately taken for the sake of justice. Romans 3 tells us that He died on the cross, purchasing redemption for sinners, so that He might be just.

That makes sense, I have always thought so, but it did not happen to fit in with my ... well, I suppose you might say, ambitions.  They were my own affair.

Hence, it becomes necessary to RECEIVE that redemption, and to do that YOU have to have a door wide enough to admit the trucks, if you like it put that way, to quarry out and remove your sin from your foundations and upward.

How do you get that door ? the thought appeals to me.

You repent. Jesus said ...

Yes, yes, I know it, except you repent you will all likewise perish. Had that in Sunday School.

That is in Luke 13.

How CAN I repent ? It is all built into my spiritual structure now.

You simply cast yourself on His mercy, call on His name, and yield by and through His mercies, to His quarrying without let or limit.

Which all bring us back to trusting the ... results of all this.

Which is, for any omnipotence with which you concern yourself, simply a matter of trusting Him.

Oh, it is not very hard to do that, obviously He is trustworthy past all.

What then is the impediment ?

It is this. WHEN He has done what HE thinks with me, and quarried and all that, and no doubt laid down a new foundation ...

DO you recall this, Other foundation can no man lay than that which IS laid...

Which is Jesus Christ. Where is that ?

It is in I Corinthians 3:11. Well, that foundation is what you GET, and in that is love, and power, and pity and someone who has died for you, for as a PROVISION, His death as in I John 2:2 is wide enough to cover all, though with good accuracy, narrow enough to cover in fact, only those who receive it (Romans 8:32ff.). There is no waste, nor is any covered by Him who is not His! The good shepherd died for His sheep, and willing to cover all, covers His own.

That certainly indicates trustworthiness and precision, for that matter.

Then He gives you for your new foundation, a new life, one which He has created as surely as He created the old one. There really is no other way, for if the old one were still there, serenely and perhaps smugly (got it made again! eh ?) sitting on such a foundation, it could make Lucy look almost good by comparison.

Lucy ?

Don't you ready Peanuts ?

Oh you mean that deplorable girt ?

Yes the one who says that it is indeed true that the thing to have in life is the easiest way of getting what you want, a sort of spiritual jet-stream being the thing to have.

Imagine her in the castle, sitting on the foundation and laughing.

I got it made MY way, eh ?

Precisely. That is what Paul discountenances and disallows in Romans 3 and Ephesians 2.  Thus the life itself has to be changed, re-made, re-formed, re-formulated, made as spiritually new as the physical life would be with new genes.

Obviously needed. It would solve all the lateral problems too, you know Smith and Jones and all of them. Some of them think far too much of themselves, that is for sure.

If He died for you, you can trust Him to live for you.

Yes, I suppose it really is as easy as that. Still it needs thought.

It certainly does, and for my part, I LOVE God, so the cost to me does not really matter. I prefer Him to me, so that what He wants is a pleasure - that is, in principle.

Yes, it has cost you enough, you could have been rich, but are not far from being poor.

I have enough. NEVER in all my life have I been UNABLE because on money, to do the will of God. It is no different now.

Yes, I suppose you are right. It works.

It has to work.

Of course it does, and it does, I can see that.

The door then, is not nearly so small when you are remade, for what is just born is very small.

Good, I'll do it.

Well that was the conversation, and it had its points. He became a Christian and was glad to find the love of God which is high, going upwards, indeed as Paul puts it in Ephesians 3:

"For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named,
that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory,
to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man,
that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith;
that you, being rooted and grounded in love,
may be able to comprehend with all the saints

what is the width and length and depth and height—

to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge;

that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

 

"Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us,
to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen."

This love, it could not be higher, soaring unscalable in its ultra-dimensional wonder, it could not be deeper, excavating from the very environs of hell, to achieve its targets, nor could it be broader, stopping neither at any race, culture or qualification or disqualification, except the preference in the last and divinely ascertained knowledge, for darkness.

It could not be better. It is the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.