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ALPHA and OMEGA:

DISCOUNT THAT

AND YOU'VE GOT A MUDDLE IN THE MIDDLE

If You Don't Grasp That,
You'll be Grasped by the Wrong Party

Chapter 5

BEYOND MORAL SUPREMACISM

AND AUTONOMOUS ARROGANCE:

TO REALISM ABOUT OUR RACE

IN TERMS OF ITS ALPHA AND OMEGA,

GENESIS AND JUDGMENT

THE UNDERLYING ISSUE

It is not the case that there is good and evil, some nearer the one, others nearer the other, with God too careless about the way suffering strikes, to act. If you know Him, you know He is careless in nothing, as also His prophecies attest, and if you don't, whose fault is that! (cf. SMR Chs. 8 - 9, The Pitter-Patter of Prophetic Feet, Ch. 4).

There is simply no middle ground where people can live as it occurs to them to do, and expect Go to bless their indifference and their lack of responsibility towards Him. If you choose to judge God, by what infinite wisdom, greater than His, can you do this ? or by what apt and accurate assessment of all things can you so presume ? As He says in Job,

"Shall the one who contends with the Almighty, correct Him ? He who rebukes God, let him answer it."

Again, He declares in this same Chapter 40:

"Now prepare yourself like a man: I will question you and you shall answer me.

Would you indeed annul My judgment ?

Would you condemn Me that you may be justified ?"

That is always a trend with man. You are in trouble, your heavens seem to shake, your earth to wobble, worry creeps up like a lion, disquietude of spirit tends to make you snappish, you lie in lairs of thought, you question yourself, you dismiss the concept of your own error, how could that possibly be ? You ruminate, excogitate, consider your ways and congratulate yourself, or at the very least consider how well they fare in comparison with those of sundry hypocrites, bloated with pride that you could mention. You dismiss the very cheek of the case which might be made against you, even to suggest that you yourself are at fault. Surely it is another, and not yourself! You change the terms of reference, or consider thinks indulgently: with you, it is all understandable. How rash and brash your accusers. You leave them to their utterly despicable devices, and continue in your own splendid innocence.

Nations do it, before admitting to lying, when the evidence becomes insuperable, at times. People do it.

Try in on, as the saying goes, with God ? Shift the responsibility to Him ?

But of course, is the thought of many. If HE is not responsible, then who possibly could be ?

HE is the ultimate resource, the superintending party: if He did not do it, then whoever did ?

The case is so similar, servitude to self and ignorance of reality.

If HE elected to make you free enough to criticise Him, how free is that ? If it is not really free, then why delude yourself with the view that you are not mouthing rubbish, in issuing criticism ?

If on the other hand, you really are speaking an independent-minded case, sound and sufficient for your own exculpation and His inculpation as the One REALLY responsible, then you have to be free, to avoid the irrelevant and the meaningless. The same, incidentally, applies to any endeavour to argue your way out of responsibility in terms of deterministic philosophy.

If you really are not free, but a contrivance in a system, then your arguments are irrational, based as if you were capable of independent and valid speech, when you are merely a determinable particle of personality, with no integral capacity to touch a truth which, on this model, is not even there: you are a speck in a maze of reactions

If then you ARE free enough to criticise Him, then you are responsible enough to be criticised.

There are now two parties in the situation: you, or more generally mankind, and God.

In that God created mankind, this body could call Him names for not doing a better job, in its opinion, its so very humble opinion.

In that it asserts liberty of mind by which to scrutinise reality and even judge it, even the source of created reality, then it exposes its nerve to tingling. In other words, if it is ABLE to make independent assessment and to take a course deemed suitable in view of that assessment, then in so doing it has just two options: to do it rightly or wrongly. Right and wrong are its song: it MAY be right but it MAY be wrong. Who is to tell ? Who is to assess the assessors ?

Is it possible, then, in THIS particular assessment, that God did not do a good enough job and it is He who is to be blamed for the parodies of principle, the acrid hypocrisies and the loveless lies which hit the earth like leaves from a deciduous forest, when stirred by the wind, in Autumn ? Grounds for this might be callowly imagined, but only by their overall denial in assuming that in that case they could be true! Is it on the other hand, possible that man has not done a good enough job with the facilities and functions, the powers and the things under his own physical and mental, moral and spiritual control, to varying extents, for his own part ? It is possible. But what of the evidence ?

Are not these very things just noted in themselves their own condemnation ? Certainly they are. Man does them; they happen. Man the critic makes his own judgments and casts about himself his own responsible judgments ? Then these are they and they breach truth and justice, equity and realism on all sides, colliding with these readily enough, power being used as a replacement for truth and justice, desire leading sundry parties to sacrifice others in the interests of their own continued living or comfort, or convenience, when in fact they are not the centre of the universe, not endowed by authority or position, with right in doing so. Nor are they immune to the adverse action of truth.

Pleasing yourself becomes a matter of contest with other pleasers of themselves, a ground of war, anguish, loss, pollution of morals, mind, memories, ground for revenge, a sting to pride and on and on and on ... almost ad infinitum. And so the world, as it comes, so it goes. Man DOES THIS.

How then can he be excused, exonerated, justified that God might be condemned, and how can HIS OWN LITTLE judgments be dignified with truth and justice, when such are his own displays.

But you say, That may be so for SOME men, but not for this humble but illustrious specimen, MYSELF!

Yet your objectivity to one side, we are not discussing you at this time, but the race. HAS IT done evil, called for judgment, have the people who let dictators rule them, who said, Yes, we will vote for change, for something new in this Presidential Candidate, or this Prime Ministerial offering, when the case was unclear and the motive for a political vacation from the past gave allure to virtual ignorance and voting became irresponsible ? Did this happen in Germany, intent on regaining might and power, when Hitler came to power ? Is it happening now in Australia and the USA ?

How is man to excuse himself by taking this or that arguable point, when the system is fraught with unarguable realities of such cunning, carelessness and treachery, such broken agreements and hideous tricks, such blastings of excellence in the pursuit of selfish advantage, that to find exceptions is enlightening and to find humility that does not proclaim itself insidiously with wanton blindness, becomes a refreshing change!

It is the human race, it is mankind, or it is God. There is no middle ground. The ULTIMATE responsibility that this world and its varying responsibilities and degrees of the same, is of course with God. If you take the line that He should never have created, that is a possible position; but that having created, He erred in giving mankind the liberty with which to bait one another, and even to judge God Himself, to caricature Him and THEN judge, which is undoubtedly the case, this is mere assertion.

Would YOU like to be turned into a mere program and lose all personality and so responsibility and meaning ? I think not. But even if you did, there are many who prize personality, delight in responsibility, rejoice in being meaningful, are amazed at the privilege of having God as a friend, like an artist himself being known and not merely his paintings, and one who can explain them with whom you may rejoice!

Is life to be annulled because you hate it ? Or if you love it, is it to be made immune to what you like, and prize, so that you retain meaning and responsibility but are not responsible ? so that you are free to act, and yet impossible to condemn ?

Is the authorship of human liberty, its investment in life, to be made nothing, its judicious assessing powers ignored, even that by which God is allegedly to be judged ? Then it is mere self-contradiction so to judge.

Is indeed man to be so determined that he is error free ? that error does not apply ? Then why does he argue that one rejecting this automaton status is wrong, and can be refuted.

If another COULD be refuted, then the case COULD be otherwise, and he has erred, indeed failed to see what another can see. If someone else MUST see it, yet he himself MUST not, then which of the two is in principle able to be right ? That would be to assume a truth past the nature of BOTH parties, contrary to the model, which has mere interacting reactors.

If on the other hand, one can be wrong, take a position in error, then that one's position is not externally determinate. If it were, it would be an area that CANNOT be otherwise. This could, nay in argument, is claimed to be such that it SHOULD be otherwise, and men strive that it WILL be otherwise, even internally as well. What is the use then of such pretence ? It is pretension. Capacity to determine truth implies freedom, and insistence on judgment, as on God for example, is merely an applied case. Free to judge, in principle, you are equally free to be judged in principle.

Then man is free^*1to judge, to err, his spirit cogitative and estimating, reviewing and imagining, his will ruminating, and so may err, and may be subject to righteous judgment. It is for this reason that he so vigorously and so often attacks others for their guilt: meaningless if determinism ruled, requiring insanity in man so to act, unless he himself could do otherwise. If the will is by nature void of truth, and there is none for it, then judgment of people and perspectives is likewise void of truth, part of an insanity syndrome thus attributed to the race.

How COULD error be attributed to any if nothing could be other than it is! What is error but misuse of what is capable, free to do otherwise in terms of what it is capable of finding: it errs because it is capable in the field of truth, and does not use its competence. The very term 'error' in a determinist model, is then a nonsense, its use a model-defiant vacation from the position taken. It like all else that ignores the spirit of man and the supervening Spirit of God^*2, does not because it cannot work. That is what really CANNOT be otherwise: failure in logic when truth is denied. So all this effort to avoid guilt for oneself in order to show it of God, or to shunt guilt in the judge in order the better to judge the Judge, it is merely one more sin, provocation, ground for judgment of mewing man. His endeavours make his guilt the greater; and his failure make his errors the more manifest.

What then ? Let us look at the biblical truth. Since God made man responsible, so that he might criticise even God without being a meaningless fragment yapping where it has no capacity to judge, then man at that moment of such self-recognition must bear the scalpel that examines him for criticism. He CANNOT then be in principle immune. He never was, but now his own conduct condemns his equivocation.

His very judgmentalism becomes his noose; for his imagined powers against another, depend on his being free to rove in action, in the case of the tongue, and so in that of his other facilities. To know and argue validly, he must have access in principle to the truth; and if not, his case in itself is instantly lost, by contradiction of his very model for thought. Indeed, if he cannot argue that others be wrong, being a mere reactor, and truth is not there to be found, as objective, then his presentation is cancelled before it begins, on any such topic. He is liable, vulnerable and actionable.

Is God to be condemned then for making man with so much liberty that distortion can be deliberate and lies an option ? Is life a loss ? Is sin its necessary captor ? If so, man could not judge, being captive. The case collapses.

Or is man able to charge God objectively, having autonomous access to truth and not being bound by circumstances within or without ? Even if he could, then he would also able to act otherwise, perceiving error and avoiding it, as presumptively in uttering judgment on God, and hence in principle ready to be judged. The alternate to mere wilfulness is reception by God, who creating a new being, purges the will from the woes of autonomy, and grants it the fulfilled option of truth, supervening, communicable, receivable (cf. Predestination and Freewill).

Is he not to be liable for judgment then ? He who sizes God up and excuses himself, is without excuse not only for daring to be superior to the One whom He criticises in terms of his analytical power, ethical purity or discrimination, as one above and discerning, imagining his heart more righteous in ways the Creator does not have, being inventor of his own wonderfulness, when nothing given to him comes from anywhere but God, including potential and powers of all kinds. Is he to be excused for such swelling arrogance nevertheless ?

On what ground ?

Is a gift of such magnitude not to become a liability for prosecution on the part of those who receive it ? Why ? because they fail to live up to its options ? because they subdued its beauty and truth to mere self-interest, enlightened by self-centredness or not! Will man indeed annul the rectitude of God so that he might in self-contradiction act as the Judge of the Almighty!

Not really. It is pure, tinny truthlessness. Man HAS misused his faculties to a degree so sustained, so pseudo-sovereign in a veritable ecstasy of pride and presumptive autonomy, as if he were god and no one could condemn him in so many ways, personal, domestic, educational, philosophic and political, militaristic and self-vaunting, ludicrously irrational and uncompassionate, ruthlessly domineering and exploitative as if by divine right, for so long, and to such an extreme extent that to attempt at all to exonerate the race is like calling black white. If some are better, much is worse. If some know God, and attend to His word^*3, most do not, and many make new words by which to deceive, profit and domineer (cf. News 121, 122).

Is God known, believed, is His word acted on, is His prescription in His verified and validated word, the Bible, carried out, is the Sermon on the Mount a matter of experimental exhibit on the part of mankind, so that to look at the race, is to see these principles in operation ? To ask is to answer.

God has set up the way, and man has devastated himself, and increasingly his world, by misapplied power and sightless vision, striving and conniving, to the point that the continuance of this race on this earth, let alone in comfort, is becoming as likely as is the continuance of life in a battered old car, which some adolescents have just smashed, as they drink drugs, inject them and expose their construction to destruction in ways sometimes ingenious to imagine, like medicine in reverse.

Man is not to be condemned ? God is of a different opinion as you see in Romans 6:23. In fact, HE does not exonerate anyone; and those perfect people who have always known God from infancy and never varied from perfection in terms of His commandments, have loved and honoured Him throughout all their lives, have never failed to find His will and His wisdom before embarking on any significant mission, for whom the Sermon on the Mount is second nature (introduce me, sometime!), these He does not acknowledge. They are never to be met.

Why then venture to condemn the Almighty ? Why not instead, each on an individual basis, repent of sin, the failure to please God and to know Him in the ONLY way He has, as a personal Being, provided, Jesus Christ, and accept His redemption through sacrifice, by which the ashes of folly are moved to Him as recipient, and the guilt of their cause are brought to Him to cover, as He died the just for the unjust to bring us to God (II Peter 3:18). In that case, believe Him when He speaks, and rejoice in peace and pardon through this same Lord Jesus Christ, and look with delicious expectancy to the fruit of the root, to the bodily resurrection when, as with the creation of the world, its day is created!

THE LACK OF PLACE FOR THE MIDDLE MAN

Accordingly, then, there is no middle ground where people can live as it occurs to them to do, and expect God to bless their indifference and their lack of responsibility to Him. If you choose to judge God, by what infinite wisdom, greater than His, can you even hope do this ? or by what apt and accurate assessment of all things ? The question drifts in and out like the buzzing of bees in Summer.

To assume that man is in his current odious and fitful mess because God did not bother with him sufficiently is a monumental libel on God, both incompetent and outrageous, impossible to be right in allowing a mere ignorant creation to act a judge of Him who entirely manufactured him, indeed even created him. Does he surpass then the Creator of ALL! Is his integumental quality above that from which alone all has come ? Is he then a competing god ? but from whose authorship ? The contest is solved before it is begun.

Further, it wilfully ignores the hinge of history, long and in detail foretold, in Jesus Christ and attested in the only testable religious book, the only verified and verifiable one, the Bible (cf. Ch. 3, *12).

There is no place for man or woman in the middle, responsible to none, judge of all, a putative fairy dropped from nowhere. Believe that you commit outrage against truth and duty. It simply adds to the casus belli - the reason for man's increasing ruin. Irresponsibility with ANY intricate equipment spreads evils proportionate to its power, and as man has so very much power, he gains much evil likewise. ONLY godless men cannot see and WILL not know.

Shutting their eyes, however as the ostrich doubtless finds out, can change nothing in reality, unless to bring forward the fate of those so wilfully blind (cf. Matthew 13:15ff.).

If you do not accept the only free and therefore effective and evidentially attested remedy in redemption of your life by God through Jesus Christ, that gift which fixes the creation, man, in place so that he is no more fuming, fulminating or fussing in a moral and intellectual vacuum, what then ? Then such a person is not only ignoring the 2 way plight of our reputation, repent or condemn God, but in the added turmoil is yielding to an inapplicable but unruly doubt, thus increasing the ground for judging, like ONE MORE part in an engine, failing to operate as scheduled.

When a race runs amok from reason and righteousness, as this one has done, then to expect a non-racial result is special pleading without rational ground. Trying to trade on the mercy of God, while in this way questioning His reputation, is a luxury not available. Truth does not bend. The point is clear: evacuate in spirit from those who would question or contend with God, that they themselves might be justified, doers of wonders and judges, or bear responsibility with it. To evacuate, accept the love of God that Christ is on offer to all, and so receive personally the remedy for those who in God's way and promise, and receive His everlasting redemption. On the other hand, to respond negatively to this love, sacrifice, testimony and power, just stay where you are.

One aspect of the prospective change ? It is to repent of not doing it sooner.

NATURE DOES NOT CONDUCT TUTORIALS

Man often and understandably looks for a way of escape. This is understandable; but to do so with understanding, one must find the opening in the ranging mountains, the pass through which one may go. It is useless in stupefied arrogance to demand that the mountains open up at one touch of the pointing finger (unless God is at work miraculously, which is on His own terms!); one must find the pass. It is not hard to find; but it is impossible if you do not find it, to escape, since it is God Himself who has put it there.

Now to avoid this narrow and confining path to victory and deliverance and pardon and peace, in a final throw and pass of impatient, unrepentant regality, some may seek some other way.

Look at 'Nature', they say, as if capitalising it gave it something of a personality, so that it may 'strive' to do this or that, or foresee the other, or make provision for something else, as if a book could recompose itself here and there when its wisdom overflowed the pages and invented a subsidiary personality, other than the author, and just did it all by itself. Some would have a 'Nature' like that, a nurturing nature, a babe as it were, that invents how to grow up, when its internal DNA instructions to that effect were somehow missing! Perhaps one could try it ...

The laws of science as Professor Thomas Barnes indicated (Ch. 3 above, *4), exhibit the creation model. Consider it in simple overview. There is the first law, conservation of mass and energy: the material universe is what it is: it is a thing there, deposited, non-self-making. Then there is the second law of thermodynamics, looked at in *4 of Ch. 3 : the thing that is there tends to run down. Then the third law, that of biogenesis, notes that life comes from life, as a matter of observation.

As to these arenas, what is to be found, what is testable, exhibits constraints for its characterisation, is held a loft as instructive, without qualification; such laws are stated, to which evolutionary theory comes as a mocker and a meddler, out of court. Creation fits like a cap: it is there and that is how it goes, as extant, as deposited, not as forming itself with logical abandon, or creative dream. This is a principle and there are no exceptions, nor can they be shown. Neither did this universe make itself, nor has it propensity to do so, not did nothing create it, by definition incapable, nor did it nor could it call itself into being from a beyond, which on this model, a competency for this purpose, which was not there. The law remains, the exceptions also remain, absent!

This world does not stay like things eternal, its work in structure, is down, not up. In this dimension, it neither shows development upwards, nor means for it. It PROCEEDS. That is what things made do: they do not make themselves at the outset. As made, they have a life-time dependent on the way, power and will of what makes them. Nothing is not apt.

The idea of actually seeing what is happening and correlating this with other things happening, and moving with prudence and care into the realms that show themselves in action, by necessary logic, not frustrated abandon, or by their testable actions: this is something that used to be fundamental to science, so giving it a good reputation, when the religious coup had not yet happened. At that more moderate time, not so willingly were we having perspectives that invented "the facts of science," in oblivion of actual facts, providing instead a mere re-statement of unsupported theory, in a sort of cardiac scientific bypass operation, to be carried out as needed, whenever investigation and THE RELIGIOUS ARENA intersected (cf. SMR pp. 140ff., TMR Ch. 1, SMR Chs. 1-3, Sparkling Life ...
Ch. 8).

Then, fey generalisations replaced actualities, not those from observation, as with the three laws noted, but from philosophic expectations, drawn from impossible philosophies. Science in this, died at once. It lived where it was not 'challenged', only; except of course for those who continued to follow its objective methods, who though not few, were not so many and did not give orders to colleges and universities and schools, explicitly and directly or indirectly, as some others did.

The means for the imaginary and unobserved process, in terms of the evolutionary philosophic nostrum, were ludicrously inadequate just as they were inaccessible in the laboratory. In effect, death became a life source, and what was needed was turned into non-laws, that non-worked instead. As Karl Popper rightly said, There is no law of evolution (SMR p. 145). The laws of thought, as shown earlier in this volume as in SMR and TMR, reject the secular squalor of organic evolution, these laws of science reject it, and it has nothing for its formulation at the testable level, since there is nothing that acts as it states, to be discerned, or discovered but the theory itself. Return however to what happens and is observable.

Nature is a given thing. It did not give itself. It is there. It grows old; even our genes, as likewise noted in the preceding Chapter, grow old, and more nearly approach entropy. There is a LONG WAY for that to go ? Unfortunately, that is not precisely the view of Professor Sanford who has pointed these things out, as earlier attested. With complex and mutually and reciprocally active inventions, downgradings may occur in various places, some more vulnerable than others, and when one increases the REASONS for this, then it happens faster.

Be the rate what it may, the reality remains. It is not from this 'Nature', this hypothesised and by some all but deified deposit, that one learns. To be sure, from this one can learn what it took for it to be, what is the minimum and so on, as Romans 1 points out and on this site has been demonstrated. Yet it is not a moral object. Creations may for this or that reason be in a good or a bad state. If one found a shanty town, would this indicate the nature of builders ? Not really: it would rather indicate what could happen to buildings, with causes, earthquake, incendiarist of the original constructions or other, to be investigated by evidence.

Why is there strife, as well as parental care, dissonance as well as amazing co-operation, in 'Nature' ?

One reason could be that it was made by someone like that. This we have earlier seen to be impossible. God has no needs and the concept of His making something lousy in order to satisfy some inherent deficit, desire or need for self-gratification merely moves from what is the limitless God to some idol of the mind. God gives, nor is He for whom nothing is a given limit or requirement, forced to do anything, nor is force any concern of Him, to threaten Him, since on Him all depends for its very being. How then does nature so war, when it is not at peace, so conflict, when it is not showing its harmonious side ?

As with man, either it was made that way, which does not fit the realities of the Creator (cf. Sparkling Life ... Chs. 4, 8, Barbs ... 6-7, Repent or Perish Chs. 2, 7), or it became that way, like the shanty town.

Why would it become that way if it had not been created like that ?

It would be because the Creator, with man in mind in his declivity, his fall, his failure, gave to his created environment a desultory, a debased, a challenged and sometimes chained side, so that just as it bore the impact of marvellous mind, as did man, so it would bear the impact of deserved curse, on man's account, so that what happened IN HIM internally, could now become what happened AROUND him, externally.

It is moving from castle to slum, because of gambling debts. Man gambled and gambolled, and fell. The pure beauties of innocence were replaced by the acrid fumes of guilt. There was a test; and he failed. He was sent down. To do this, he had to stay on the earth as part of the unrevised plan which would lead eventually to glory where it found its place in the human heart through the transcendent grace of the living God.

Meanwhile, the earth remained and man remained in it, so that this would be itself downgraded. Its superb beauty would remain; its noble aspects such as the sacrifices of parenthood would stay; remnants of beauty as in an old house after a civil war, would stay. But there would be rigour and there would be labour (Genesis 3, Romans 5), and there would be REASON for labour, and man, instead of being incinerated for his sin, would become a spectator of his own follies, their results at his own hand, and at the hand of God. Into this pit from summit, the Gospel of grace would be foretold, featured, focussed and then by God's own action once more, as in the creation, DONE BY HIMSELF.

Accordingly, God brought the curse to the earth; and He also brought redemption. He spoke to create, but He also spoke^*4in immediate intelligibility to man, to remove man from desecration to new creation, by means of His own creation, even the Cross of Christ (cf. I Corinthians 1, for the tang and savour of this action).

There is no middle ground. You ignore Alpha and you get Omega in judgment^*5. On the other hand, you receive Alpha, the God of creation, and repent, and you find Omega, the end of the glorious beginning, Himself the curse-bearer (and there was nothing greater that could be done for our human welfare than that), by BECOMING man and taking it on Himself once for all. Further, He even donated the result, including immortality in the resurrection of body, and at once in spirit, to those who receive Him.

Not to spiritual aristocrats did He come, as if to select, Hitler-style, the best. Not to the wise, in much, did He come, as if to sanctify the academic follies of rebellious man. Of some of the ones reputed to be great, He is the Saviour, but not of too many (I Corinthians 1). It is where AT LAST, man ceases trying to escape by making an implicit or even explicit case against God, when at last he humbles himself ontologically and psychologically as well as logically, it is when with broken heart man comes to be redeemed, wrought and brought by the Spirit, to his Redeemer, making this heart of his anew, that there is space for grace.

NOTES

See on Liberty:

Licence for Liberty,

Repent or Perish Ch.    7.

Message ...    Chs. 5, 4,

Christ Incomparable ... Ch.     2,

The gods of naturalism have no go! 14,

Evidence and Reality Chs. 2, 5, 6, 7

Impossible to Men, Open to God Ch.     3,

Dig Deeper, Higher Soar ... Ch. 1,

The Kingdoms of This World and the Kingdom of Christ Ch.     8,

The Holocaust of Morals and the Coming of Christ the King Ch.    3,

Glory, Vainglory and Goodness ... . 1,

God's Gift of Grace in Christ Jesus Ch     7,

History, Review and Overview Ch.     5,

It Bubbles ... He Calls Ch.    9,

Spiritual Food and Spiritual Drink Ch.    4

It is really remarkable how many unsophisticated philosophers seem to enjoy imagining their own models, and applying these to someone else's model as if this were a criticism.

Thus the power to be free comes from God WHO IS, and can confer it where the parameters made are allowed to be adjusted to those inherent, His own, so that truth becomes the pathway and life runs as intended. Before conversion, many a soul, made by God, with the stamp of God's approach and perspective residual in his life though distorted, and the residue of his conscience looming like a large liner through the thick mist, AND with the Spirit of God working as He will, with power to act, as He knew before time, all that would be, and held love as free and part of liberty, and not constrained and a mere mockery, is tweaked, stricken, guilty before its own judgment bar. Distressed, it seeks; exposed, it ruminates; and Augustine is a good example of this.

Not yet saved, it yet is in the sphere of operation of Him who is mighty to save, with all power and no duress, seeking. The call comes through, and is disturbing, distressing or even agonising; the other realm is presented, is felt, and it is natural like one's correct but no longer used address. There is another way of willing, but it is not attainable. Nevertheless it appears, like gold in the earth, located but not to be visited.

The awareness of another sort of will may be keen; the option seems as close as an orchid, to the hand; but there is glass between, plate glass, which improves the view but not the accessibility. God is taking action.

When HE acts to save, then the glass is removed from the soul whom He has known before time was, and the reality of desire becomes the actuality of presence.

See SMR p. 100, *30, for further considerations in this field. See also SMR Ch. 1.

Repent or Perish Ch. 2 is very much to the point of the present discourse,
and accordingly, an excerpt from it is taken.

There are nowadays disasters and devastations, mass murder and mayhem, folly and fiasco of dauntless visionaries, whose vision is death, though they call it life.

London is like one of many cities in an allegory which we could map, on the face of the earth. Here, capital of the country which spawned Charles Darwin, with whom they visited the world, near where he studied, they are as the national centre which proceeded in his name, to MASK THE INVISIBLE. Small wonder Darwin became so blind to beauty that he mourned the decline. Imagining what does not happen, and happening to declare what is never found, with doubts and admissions he formulated a faith which is founded on nothing but blasphemy or unbelief or both, as if God were guilty of making a world by such means as he, Darwin envisaged; or as if he, Darwin could know it if He did.

How would a man be better than God, or see through the vile violences of his Maker, who with excruciating horrors in that model, invented a world by means of vice, viciousness and folly, where those who pride themselves on their being better, are better than God! How could you even know God when you were yourself a part of His violences and idiocies, while PRETENDING to be better, a cog in His mechano set, a unit in His atomic structurings, a pulse in His contrivances? Did He tell you? Alas, He has told something very different!

Will God create a world of madness by sobriety? Or will you be sober and He mad? Or will you be good and He bad? Can you have knowledge which He lacks? Or has God evolved? And by what system and who made it? Could you penetrate to the heart of the Most High, and tell Him? or are you part of this world and its ways, and have you come to even exist by the whole parody of surviving first, and doing the worst as the case may require? And if so how are you better? and if you are better, where did you obtain it? and if you are better than God, how did it grow? And how could anything be good if God were bad? Or are you enlightened while He is in the dark? Has His handiwork outwitted Him, left Him wallowing in stupidity and aridity and vacuity and outlandish follies which simply do not work, and threaten this benighted globe, while the world has such as you who both see and know better?

Better than God? It is no small assumption. It is to make of yourself your God, and to fail to have the advantage of being divine! It is to be your own maker, and to assess favourably what you have made, or your family or your school, your nation, your race or your culture, of which you are so fine a member! Do you remember the story of the publican (quisling tax-gatherer on behalf of the Romans, grabbing from your defeated co-nationals for gain, as administrator) and the Pharisee? This also is found in Luke. In 7:29ff. we see that many publicans repented and "justified God", being baptised.

What does this mean? It shows that they acknowledged their sins, in that being baptised is symbolic of washing, a sprinkling such as the Bible prescribed to "cover", formerly in blood but now in water, since the only blood that counts was that of Christ, now once for all shed (see Questions and Answers 11, 9).

But how did they JUSTIFY God? It was this: THEY had sinned, not God! They were RESPONSIBLE for their sins, not God. GOD had acted for their deliverance, not they! God in Christ had PROVIDED for their relief from the mischiefs of flesh, carnal imaginings, gainless profit and selfish advantage. Their insane putting of themselves in the cockpit of life, to drive the aeroplane of their selves as if they made it, making themselves the centre of operations and imagining and imaging what they would, clearly irrational and contrary to reality, was not the end. God had not created them mad and then turned His back on them. HE HAD ACTED.

CHRIST was the culmination of the action, and His salvation was the heart of the culmination, His self-declaration being the exposition of God, the manifestation of truth (John 14:6). As to that, they received Him for who He was and for what He had done.

Hence in acknowledging their OWN sin, they justified God. They did not blame HIM for their own faults, or the world's follies, but admitting their own errors, they acknowledged God, that He had provided not only the power to sin, a part of the power to love, something which arose by their own misuse of freedom, not as a gift, but as a molestation of His gifts: but He had provided equally the power of salvation.

They were not Darwinists, and this not only because he had not as yet managed to arrive on the scene. They justified God, not by blaming Him for the calamities, personal or national, processive or philosophic, judgments and warnings: but blaming themselves for their own sin, acknowledged the purity of Him who forgave sin, and His provisions.

In A Spiritual Potpourri Chs.1-9, and That Magnificent Rock Ch.1 as in The Shadow of a Mighty Rock, Chs.1-3, we show the IMPOSSIBILITY of the Darwinian concept, and any like it, of the whole organic evolutionary concept for the making of life and its basic forms and formats; as equally the necessity of the righteous God, by logic. Here however, our concern is to see some of the moral follies of the application of the truth to the personal life of man, to the arrogance and spiritual idiocy (Hosea 9:7, Psalm 53) when God is not justified, but people instead would justify themselves. Indeed, let us revisit the last named book, p. 100, and consider the matter a little further. We shall somewhat adapt it, add to it, and for all that, let it appear indented below.

Perhaps it may not hurt if we toss this aspect this way and that, a little more, the better to appreciate what may be obvious to many, since it is for many, critical to life itself to realise what is happening.

One further element, which follows from the others, is this. If it were felt that God, the Almighty, the Creator had in fact not spoken, it would not merely be contrary to the justice which is from Him, who made all things in their relationships as they ought to be, according to His desire.

It would not merely similarly conflict with His truth, by which all reality has an owner and a word, called into being by His direction which constitutes it as it is, so that for Him to lie is self-affront, and self-affront is conflict and conflict is warring between what is desired, and what is: which is only for beings who have some endowment from outside. It would mean the topic was NOT GOD.

It would actually further mean that He for whom lie is self-affront, is willing to be affronted through lie, by those who are not even part of Himself, while the evil is outrageously contrary to His own being and excluded by it. Truth is what is CONSTITUTED by His nature, what is. Lie therefore is what attacks His nature.

To invent what contradicts what you are, at your pleasure, and this without remedy, or need, which is excluded, is to be of two minds, living simultaneously two lives, contrary to one another; and this entails that such a being as this portends, would be of two-fold construction, and hence of a planned and apportioned nature, a thing of creation.

To suffer such things as lies without remedy, this would represent a funereal lust, an arbitrary invasion of His Being, denial of it, and departure from it. Remedy is destruction or revelation: removal or cure. It is necessary, it is found. His word is. His expression has been presented over the millenia, is found in book format, and in eternal majesty, in Christ, the living word of God.

But what if it were not found, what if He had not spoken, were not expressed, had provided no remedy for this world, while it yet continued ? The result ? It would be this. Contrary to His life, and hence contrary to the One who knowing all exhaustively, and leasing life out in creation at His exclusive will, is always what He would be, cannot die or change, and by being what He is, and doing and speaking it, constitutes truth: such an imagination has drifted into dealing with some demi-urge, which is not the subject. It is of God whom we speak.

Therefore, to distil such a thought about God is libel on divinity, folly in conception and rebellion in unreason. As to God, it is certain that His speech adorns the earth, and it follows rigorously from His very existence.

Far from surprising therefore is His statement that He has not left Himself without a witness! (Acts 14:17, Psalm 50:19ff., Amos 4:13, Isaiah 45:18-19). It would be thinkable that He would, just as the square root of minus one, is thinkable; but it is inconceivable that it should be so, for it is a mere contradiction in expression, of what logic faithfully requires; for even reason will not suffer it, which God has given to us (cf. Romans 1:19-12).

But let us look further once again, at lies. Indeed, to be in internal conflict is not to be God, whose nature is eternal and without intrusion from without, who is as He would be, whom nothing can hinder and who gains nothing from what is His exhaustive construction, the creation; who lacks nothing, and for whom nothing is required. In Him, no conflict energises distortion, for conflict bespeaks inner contraries unresolved and hence delimitation and hence being a creature; and in Him, no desire disturbs what He is and does, for His desire is what is, as in the case of His creation, which He mercifully enables to meet His desire and His truth, or to be banished.

Further, what is in Him, IS His desire, and hence it is that He is it. Accordingly, as to lie, nothing allows it, for it would represent a disclaimer of what is His desire, and hence a verbal assault on Himself, or equally, on what He has done, which being the unqualified outcome of His wishes, similarly is representative of Himself: so that a clash between word and deed or intention, even if freely desired, would amount to war between parts, past and present or future, one or all. As to this, even if it were strategically planned, it entails the concept of clash, disruption or dispersion in part or whole, of one thing by something else, or striving to this end; and hence the reality of dissidence within, contraries in operation.

Contraries however to what ? To each other. If God harboured that, He would be a constituted entity, dealing with what He would as He could within, to secure what was not yet the case. He would have failed entirely to have become what He would, since internal and contradictory agitation would signify irresolution, which is non-achievement of the end, and hence the heritage of a creation, not of God. That, once again, as a mere creation, is entirely irrelevant to our concern: the speech of the one rightly called GOD.

Indeed, such contrarieties bespeak inadequate power to obtain, to envisage or to perform, an internal collision of categories: impossible for God, being a flat contradiction of God. Such things are attributable only to what is created, which hence may be so limited, delimited and enmeshed!

This then is the nature of lie, wherever and in whomever.

For man to lie or be unjust is thus also assault on the Almighty's ways and on His constructions, which move and live and act and interact, some of which love and desire Him, some seeking to disrupt the same!

It is assault on Him, whether on the part of those who so lie to one another and to Him - or indeed ABOUT HIM. Ignorant of nothing, alert to the alive, sustaining all things, it is to Him the invasion of His property, His principles and His power mounts its thrust. A contrary spirit as well as a contrary quest proceeds. Not merely is it contrary; it is antagonistic, militant and machinates. Of this, He knows the end, before it begins, and He? He has no place for the learning by misfortune who invented events.

And yet the world has abundance of it: of injustice, suffering as a result, of disruption of justice, disturbance of truth, seizing by violence of what is due, of lies and fraud, religious pretension, often for gain; and being His, is it then left senseless and dead with no correction?

If this did not disturb Him, those principles are not His; and if not His, then he is not God, but rather is it He whose principles they are, and whose concern is not divorced from reality.

What then? To accept and disregard in silence, all this, it is not God, who in such a case would be One who voluntarily invents His assailant, creates His caricaturist and the violator of His principles, and then "ignores" it all, as if He were dead, though it attacks His system, abuses His provisions and usurps His prerogatives. Not dead, but a miasmic myth is such a profound minister of His own overthrow, defilement of His own purpose-built property and mutilation of His own operational name, invasion of His own realm. Since He is, then His silence is impossible.

He has no need to "learn", since He invented our learning-growth devices, whose is all;

has no potential to develop, since there is none to endow Him with it, nor growth membrane to confer, nor is there deception to assist who needs no assistance, nor abuse to misuse, who has all, and for whom what is arises from He who is, so that it is in itself, His desire. Moreover, if He were deficient, and needed the sight of suffering for His comfort, deficiency is the lack of what is needed for a purpose, and such a lack at once entails an endowment of what does not match in one thing, what is present in another.

That however is the nature of creation which comes to be, and is not its own self-sufficiency.

Again, had He ignorance of developments, so that He needed to find out, and hence suffered things to 'go awry', this is merely one of the endless seeming contradictory propositions which might be made, all irrelevant, for they all start by assuming what the necessities of the case have been shown to require: HE HAS NO NEED. HE IS FREE ENTIRELY. Knowledge moreover takes derivation from Him, and strictly, without Him, is not possible, merely instead leaving the vacancy to reaction-response involvement. Exhaustively, utterly and always, He knows all that is, having invented all that is, with no other place from which anything at all could be drawn.

Let us consider further. No constraints could have required anything of Him, no system could have contained Him whose is the beginning the cause of it all (SMR Chs.1,3), and no character or desire within is capable of frustrating Him, either in itself or in any combination or synthesis with other desires; for nothing is, with precision, what He cannot deal with, and nothing, again with precision, is His inheritance from before, for there is no 'before' for the ground and cause of what is.

He is stopped and curtailed... by NOTHING! HE IS, curbed by NOTHING, constrained and controlled by NOTHING, has need of NOTHING, inventing as He will and dealing with His inventions in entire accord with what is His desire. What He is, is His desire; and what He does, is representative of His nature. What contradicts it is representative of war on Him, attack on what He is, and hence a contest of strength proceeds: CAN GOD dissipate or remove what is so contrary ? or distil from it what He wishes as through redemption, which both exhibits the wisdom and removes the blot ? Assuredly He can. If He did not, He would by an indirection, in creation's nature, unredeemed, be at war with Himself, the very ultimate in contrariety, non-resolution, inability.

If it is hard for warped souls to construe purity, this is not to the point, except for the advancement of those who have learning difficulties. The matter remains the same. Such beings as those, are not God. Since at this point our interest however our interest is with the Almighty, they need not concern us.

Some, then, may wish a schizophrenic 'god', but the demonstrated logical need is for an operative one, whom

a) nothing can embarrass,

b) nothing resist in the end, in the fulfilment of His plans for His purposes, and

c) none may disregard,

to the abortion of His ways,

to the submersion of His principles,

the harassment of His nature,

the compromise of His operations,

the invasion of His purity, or

to the abuse of His desires, designs and deliverances.

It is not He who is left as if dead while His creations are free to insult Him who made it all, free to scarify His productions, and distort with lies and fraud about Himself, this also, cheating, abetting what is contrary to Him, and that while even acting in His name.

In such a situation, in principle, and according to the One who He is, action is sure. The fact that the Bible indicates that this is the case, does not alter the logical certainty which attaches to such an action in such a case as this current world represents (cf. Psalm 50:21-23, Isaiah 59:14-19; That Magnificent Rock Ch. 5, SMR pp. 25ff.).

The Being, then, who would sit about or lounge in spirit while such incredible abuse of His principles, properties and name occurred, is not God (cf. Acme, Alpha and Omega - Jesus Christ Ch. 11, Barbs, Arrows and Balm 6, 7). Since God, as we have demonstrated as noted above, IS, then HE HAS ACTED to REMEDY the situation, and since it is so contrary to Him in so much in deed, then the action must include words.

Where man has spoken, HE HAS SPOKEN; where man has acted, HE HAS ACTED.

Where false principles are in view, He has produced pure and adequate ones, ones including remedy, so that reality is realised. As we traced in detail in Ch. 1 SMR, that is definitively in the Bible, operationally in Jesus Christ, its focus, history's paragon...

To create liberty is wonderful, though its results can be strong. It implies the possible expression of things contrary to Him, blatantly or wantonly; and it enables the securing of persons in His image, who can love and respond to Him, to each other and to trial, test and reality. (Cf. Job 1.) Liberty is readily understandable, and for my part, intensely desirable, a massif of life, profound like the heavens, deep like the lakes, a magnificence in His image, astonishing to the mind, stirring to the heart, enlivening to the spirit.

To let such liberty play 'God', however: that is something else; and since He lives, it is He who is God, that infinite all-surveying Spirit, so that the confused whirring of contrary procedures and principles as the status quo, in the established pattern of what lives and relates to Him, would compromise Him, contradict His speech, annul His provisions, would meld with His plans, meddle with His life-projects and master the performances of Him who knows all things - unless He acts to invest it with His being, to qualify it with His power. And He lives forever.

Indeed, He who has created liberty has known its exercise and provided for its abuse, His principles upheld, His procedures ample, His remedy for this foreknown development, in place (see The Everlasting Gospel, Item 17, Barbs, Arrows and Balms), so that His people are within its hold, His enemies within its control and His plans perfect. At the direction of His word, which brings authority into the melee, all is accounted for without remainder, and the love of liberty with the liberty of love, His own sacrifice the make-weight, His own Being the source and the focus, is consummated in a redemption which leaves the original liberty a mere preliminary here perfected (cf. Hebrews 12:23-29).

Further: Death indeed is not apt for the Almighty whose life made it all, whose knowledge sees the end and creates the beginning, and who is always as He would be, nothing delaying or compromising: the "I am" behind all that grows and goes. Ever what He would be, He is without end, as without beginning; and as to death - it would be... a change!

But not for Him: who being always what He would be, and knowing all things, subject to no plans for Him (for there is none to make them), all depending on Him - has no change. When, as planned in love, therefore, it took the body of Christ, His Spirit at once returned home, and on earth He simply broke death (Hebrews 2), in a deep and vastly ramifying sovereign deed. This fundamental miracle of the Creator of life, He took care to do with mathematical precision (in 3 days, Matthew 16:23, I Cor. 15:1-3, Acts 10:40, Luke 24:21 cf. SMR Ch. 6) and geographical consummation (Matthew 26:32, John 21, cf. SMR Ch. 6, pp. 473ff.), indeed further prophetic felicity in that this last was done in Galilee, the predicted site of sovereign splendour of light from the Lord, for some 7 centuries, when the Messiah would come (Isaiah 8:21-9:7 cf. Divine Agenda Ch. 5).

HIS Agenda never fails.

Plans are from Him, not for Him. Things of process change, limited, conditioned; but the Inventor of process, for whom all process which moves on the way somewhere is creation, He does not change and arranges all things after the counsel of His own will.

Neither does He change for the better, being always what in all knowledge, is best; nor does it occur for the worse, lest being the best, He acknowledge it was not so, who yet knows all. Both change and death are simply self-contradictory for God, but those who contradict Him, it is they who will change.

THEREFORE:

Alive and judge, God sees the contradiction of His being and of His principles and of His provisions: He from whom life is a gift, and for whom death is merely the intrusive penalty He imposes on life astray.

Speak? If God did not then SPEAK to this race, not only would justice and truth lie dead, while injustice and lies and fraud abounded.*1If possible, worse would be implied.

If, then, it were conceived that God had not spoken, while the world remained as it is, then God would also be insulted by the very thought that He would remain inactive in speech to direct and resolve the problems in His world, leaving in silence the insolence and madness of man, assaulting and offending each one the other.

It is not only blasphemy, that is, a misuse of the very assured, minimal character of His glory; it would also be a denigration, a travesty and a direct personal offence so to speak or to think.

A problem out of the power of God! a problem in the very world which He created, out of His depth, beyond His scope, when He had freely created all things, the whole set of abilities and of circumstances for all created life! It would be like telling a film star that she had no face, or a financier that he had no funds, or a real estate agent that he would not know a house if he saw one! Since God Almighty has been shown a logical necessity, this is not merely insulting, blasphemous, but impossible.

The concept that He would be willing, moreover, to let be such folly and filth, such wilful, wanton pain as we have just seen in Kuwait and with the Kurds, when, having a solution, He did not use it: this would be like telling a social hostess that she couldn't care less if her guests starved!

Thus there is not only the metaphysical madness of such assertions, such views, such positions (cf. SMR Chs.1, 3, 10, That Magnificent Rock, Ch.5): there is also the moral assault on God which is involved^*2. If, indeed, we his creatures would be amazed at the madness of anyone suggesting such things about us, how much more should we be ashamed even to think such things about God, who gave us the power to think and the knowledge with which to know (cf. Psalm 94:8-11; SMR Ch.3), without whom we are merely reactors, for whom truth is not an option, though it be 'spouted' and views upon Him latheringly expressed.

A solution He has indeed shown, and evidenced it so voluminously that even the greatest tomes can scarcely do justice to the overwhelming grandeur and scope of His verifications (SMR is merely ONE of the works by this one author, on that topic!). But man ignoring God in vast numbers, disdaining His word and wanting to hear and know nothing of His speech, indeed even often denying it, so willing to move the blame for undoubtedly high-level immorality and actual agony, often sustained, onto God, wants Him a dumb dog, lying down and snoozing. It wants Him so, or it implies Him so; or else it is in conscious and manifest rebellion. Either way, it is much the same: arrogant disregard or rebellion.

The solution is redemption through His own blood, that is the death of the Saviour, God AS man, Jesus Christ, for the Son of Man, Christ indicated, did not come to be served, but to serve and to give His life as a ransom for many (Matthew 20:28).

A SHORT WORK ON JUDGMENT: OF WHOM, BY WHOM, FOR WHAT ?

It is helpful to consider now, rather than later, for what man is due in judgment; and what better way is there than considering the literal impertinence of trying to condemn God, on the part of man or anyone.

Let us bring it up, as if it were charges.

What might be said, as a mere first beginning for introduction!

FIRST

You charge God with being below your standards of morals, ethics, responsibility, kindness and so on, ad nauseam.

Ontologically, how may this be. Your very condemnation implies that you are speaking of or to a Being who is responsible, for whom all things come, as their sovereign, from whom all things as their condition and creator: for otherwise, why waste words!

Is your Creator, sovereign, the One on whose creative action your existence depends, then, for this Being to be subjected to blame, it is as if you could rise above not merely the One who made you, but the God of all, from whom, on account of whom, through whose Being and qualities and power, all things are in existence. YOU are to transcend your basis, teacher not just your mentor, but your Creator of your constitution with all of its potentials ? This merely contradicts the assumptions on which any charge could be levelled. That is the ontological barrier. It is not possible that such a succulent suggestion as is implicit in such a judgment of God could be valid.

SECOND

Further, if someone tries the reductionist, determinist role, that spawn of mechanistic or programmable thought, which would have programmers programmed, and persons subjects of illusory liberties, then what is the validity of what has no liberty to dispose of its thoughts, imagine and select, but is bound by forces impersonal, making of man's pretence to have God sub judice, the work of a puppet corresponding with its maker about the right way to pull strings.

THUS

There are TWO barriers to such judgments of the Creator by man, and there is nothing to be said if you are talking of something less, beyond whom there is the actual responsibility: we are talking of that actual responsibility, whose it is.

Let us however consider the determinist delusion, that there being just reactive reactors, there is no truth, nothing is absolute and entire in comprehensive knowledge, and that there is no such thing. Then you do not have access to it, since nothing has no access route, nor bridge nor highway, since the end is not there on such a model. What is not there cannot instruct, and what cannot on such a model be found, cannot be utilised. This, for the reductionist case, merely makes a third barrier to such judgments. The ludicrous character of reductionist determinism, moreover is dismissable on many grounds (cf. Repent or Perish Ch. 7, Christ Incomparable ... Ch. 2), but suffice here to note that it would not even be possible to present such a theory validly, if truth were not there. It would be past before its dawn, dead before its arrival, past away in the ambulance of preparation.

Let us then move from the already dead areas for judgment of God, to rational options for such a presumption, and consider the results. Let man then not be insane as a race, and not be inclined to blame God and others, on the basis of the assumption that truth is not relevant, but rather because he is precisely able to assess, does it continually, takes it that he has truth available, and applies it with a conviction because of the entire rational, volitional, imaginative and testing apparatus and spirit given to him, and functional within him.

Let man now attempt, being more at home with reality, to judge God, at least let us hold this in view for analysis. Now we see at least more consistency. Now he does not have to condemn God for making him constitutionally void of judgment in truth, and so unable to condemn. Now he does not condemn Him for making him incapable of just condemnation. He at least has less irrationality, even though the ontological barrier remains.

No more is reductionist, deterministic man condemning Someone for or with his own inability justly to condemn, nor is he any more arguing that those who differ from his idle philosophy are objectively wrong, and so to be condemned for their error, when error is meaningless since it cannot be made, since the term can relate meaningfully only to what CAN err, that is, is not determined as a mere dirigible entity. He does not, in this case, need to forsake his model, in other words, in order to use it.

We advance then. But now man IS capable of error, of being responsible and inept, wrong-headed, wrong-hearted, more heated than lit, of seeking to save his bacon while killing the pig, indeed of attacking God wrongfully and in principle, of being condemned by the same, justly.

Has man's record as a race a strong and salient feature of self-control ? humility in face of realities not to be overthrown, because those of his very constitution ? of kindness and care, in not damaging co-created objects (we recall that GOD is being condemned, is part of the model of attack, and so cannot logically be removed at the same time!) ? of justice so that facts are faced and not dreamed away ? of truth so that impact with reality does not bruise and ruin ?

In a word, no, man is not like that, as a race. Is he then nationally led by heroes, politically willing to follow men of ideal, leaders of understanding ? Very often not, and in fact, often he comes in tens of millions at a time, either willingly, like fools, or unwillingly, like captives of someone's folly, to murder and call it victory; but over what ?

Do children come early to know the God of their creation, find His will and way as if their very lives depended on it and Him, as they do ? Not normally: some do. Do even these come as soon as they may ? and of those who would be presumed to do so, have they never sinned then, or before ? Do we have angels in our midst ? These have not been observed in the general pattern of mankind.

If then man is condemnable before God, for psychic waste, political waste, racial wars, intellectual imprisonment of those who disagree with the latest philosophic dither, for warring on God by NOT finding His will as a pre-eminent consideration from the first, and of course for his various ... actions, what is the point of condemning God ? It is ontologically impossible and has no grounds even statable, a bypass of the condemned to their Judge.

Cruelty is a specialty in our race, and judgment has been deferred so often since the flood, that it is utterly amazing that the race is tolerated any more at all. Is God cruel to bring reality to our attention before judgment in truth rules out more mercy ? Is His delay in terminating the affair of man reprehensible ? Is the liberty without which love is meaningless, to be removed ? Must all suffer, in this, that NONE could know God and find peace and life as made for man, in Him, because some cannot and WILL not stand it ? Is God to be condemned because of the wonder of His gifts, the magnitude of His grace, the certainty of His salvation, the cost of its purchase and the amplitude of its offer ? Perhaps by some, but not rationally.

If then aberration and revolution, rebellion and indifference may find their own home in wastage, so may love and liberty, joined to their source, find the place where grace would have them.

God having foreknown those whom violence does not take, but love, for all its restraint, may find, loses none (II Timothy 1, Romans 8). If we think of the God of the Bible, there is no loss. If we think of something else, it is not there, in this field (cf. SMR, Light Dwells with the Lord's Christ, Who Answers Riddles and where He is, Darkness Departs). Put differently, we are considering accusation against Jesus Christ, the Christian Trinity.

Man, then, as a race is to be condemned, and the logically ludicrous effort to condemn God is condemned in advance, as merely constituting more ground for condemnation. This occurs as man departs from the way to God, ignores, denies or decries Him happily, or in mordant treachery against divine kindness in the Gospel, extensively and intensively expensive to produce, in that God became man and died for sin that man might live eventually without it, in His own blessed presence; and departing, sees what will be.

But are not some better than others ? Of course, but when you have cancer and ignore the only available operation for cure, relative merits of refusal become somewhat similar in estimation, in terms of outcome, the decision to decline being the basis of declination. THIS is the criterion (John 3:19).

The reality is impressive, expressive and not at all depressing, since it is just and loving at the same time, a delicious composite in One. Man as a race is a fallen entity; his world is a cursed entity (Romans 5), and the fall and the sin against the Creator is the cause of the curse. It is not left without beauty and wonder, magnificent attributes and glorious opportunities for life; it does not deny its inheritance, not for its own part; but it is a scene often of tragedy as man continues willingly and wilfully to ignore, in masses and murders, in armies and philosophies, in artful ways and vehement violence, in indifference and implausible self-sufficiency, what is most necessary. There is an end to such things.

It is useless to condemn God on the basis that He is not there. In order to condemn you must face what is putatively to be condemned by the human maestros so inclined. Since He is there, and as demonstrated, His Gospel is there, more real than the stars in this, that they wear out but He does not, and it does not alter, while they have merely a relative fixity, then we being here, need to come near. If we do not, we are left, deliberate orphans, and where is the cruelty in that, except that we are being cruel to ourselves, and defiant to redeeming love, for all its cost in Christ.

Isaiah 55 puts it simply and clearly: Come while He IS near; and do not wait till distance defiles. It is not a play program to tune into at will; it is a sentence to avoid at His will, kindness, and blame in not accepting pardon is great. You cannot logically blame God because you reject His kindness! You may indeed blame yourself, but even this is unnecessary once you have come to Him, since then your sins are removed as the East from the West (Psalm 103).

Seeing where we are, OUTSIDE by nature, since the fall, and needing to COME inside, because of it, and to ACCEPT the way in, since it is the only one, from the Only One with power and propriety to offer it, and He knows what He is doing: this is critical. It is not of God one should be critical, but in attitude to what is essential, seeing what really is critical for what it is. Being drunk with the wine of false religion or philosophy is explanation, not justification.

The only justification which counts is that before God, and since as sinners we CANNOT gain this by anything we can do (returning stolen goods helps, but they are damaged in this case, and have to be accepted and restored), it is necessary to accept one vicariously wrought, in this, that HE, Christ, became sin for us, in His grand and overall offer and provision, that we, taking Him at His offer, might become righteousness in Him. That is found in II Corinthians 5:17ff.

In this, it is transfer: HE takes our guilt, and WE take His righteousness, since HE in Himself bore the sin, and having swallowed it up in all justice in the death sentence for it, is free to communicate His own status to us, as the One who covers! HE is the covering, but He is also the life.

This is yet another reason why condemning God is not only irrational, but futile. HE did not ruin the operation on the cross or the resurrection. We are the ones ready to ruin, if not already in Him, based on Him, led by Him. It is no mere legal matter; but it covers all components of our situation as a race, and hence, initially, as individuals. It is a vital matter. Life is what God created, and in our case, personal life. It is a glorious thing, though in sin and in a sinful and cursed world, subject to much physical, mental and spiritual harassment, and release, relief and kindness.

Once we come to Him, then life as from God, comes to us, as it was in essence at the first (Colossians 3:10), and though the curse is not lifted thereby from the earth, we are lifted from its impact, so that as servants of liberty, lovers of the Lord, people of peace, we may work for Him who made us, and deliver others by His grace, that greater grace which like the sun on a hot day, when finding its place for light, does not cease on and on, to deliver its strength. It may cost; it may mean help to deliver lambs from wolves (Acts 20:29); but its aim is peace where it may be found, and physical violence is not with it.

This is not being bits of chaff blown by the wind, or people with minds blown by every wind of crazy philosophy or theology: this is transformation through salvation, to partnership with the Lord, as heirs of salvation; and that is sublime.

The word of God in the Bible, the salvation of God in Christ and the life of God through the Spirit of God, move in their ways of wonder, so that it becomes, just as it was before a divided matter of living in a world condemned, without divinely lit life, now it is one of living in Christ, surrounded by His provisions, like pilgrims on the way, inclined to the light, led by it and personally in communion with the God of all creation, the author of our salvation.

Do you condemn a surgeon who has delivered you from a slow and rotting death ? Why would you and how could you ? Do you condemn the God who delivered you ? It would be a work in reverse, using the wrong and unfitting gear. Do you find yourself critical of the One who delivered you from the explosive horrors of the critical mass of judgment ? It would be ludicrous. Do you condemn Him who makes of this rescued life, one that is eternal ? If He is glorious, that would be to hate a seaside holiday because of the cool, mid-Summer breezes. It would be delusion.

Why be deluded ?