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CHAPTER TWO

 

To Know,  To Show, To Act:

The  Glorious Quality of Divine Foreknowledge,  Predestination and Love

 

THE BIBLICAL CHRISTIAN HAS THE ANSWER TO WHAT NEITHER THIS WORLD

NOR BIBLICAL CONTORTIONISTS CAN FIND

 

Oh  that you had listened! this is the heartfelt cry of God as seen in Isaiah 48:16ff..

What then do we read in I Thessalonians 5:9-10 ? It is this:

"God has not appointed us to wrath but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us,
that whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with Him. 
Therefore comfort each other and edify one another, just as you also are doing."

God APPOINTS to salvation. If HE did not, how would man escape his fallen will ? Fallen ? WHEN man was first made,  contact and communion with God was, if not automatic, then normal,  natural and inherent. Hence he could choose, knowing what he was about. When however, as demonstrably now, from birth angelicism is not one of his attributes, the angelic is not sustained, however much some may hope it is (cf. Psalm 51:5-6), and to put it differently, the knowledge of God in a personal and direct fashion is no more the part of the babe, child, youth or man, but must be acquired: how can he be free enough to love God ? All his or her thoughts are filtered through the personality, and this like a dirty funnel, precludes the very arrival of the pure knowledge of God. How then can true choice be made ?

To be sure, vision may come, but into what does it come and how is it beheld ? If the soul is at peace with God, and has the normal and necessary knowledge of God, in terms of the way in which we were first made, well: then vision may indeed bring the soul to peace. IF God appointing the soul to glory, brings in the regenerative newness of the freshly spiritually born (born again), again well. If however the soul languishes outside the necessary and pure knowledge of God (I Corinthians 2:14), how will it not find such knowledge alien, contrary ? In essence, of course, God is able to penetrate past the promiscuity of pollution and bring the soul to Himself, but how ? Is it a warrant from an interested party ? How would this be love or liberty or realistic or meaningful or expressive of anything but the will of another ? Do you regenerate the one you love in order to have the love returned ? What is it that you so find ? It is your own will.

Yet, for all that, God's insistence on NOT in any way forcing the will, standing back and in true love,  allowing its rampage,  stampede, hypocrisy, folly to bind itself to the squalor it desires, is manifest, and expressed in the most eloquent of terms. If it were not so, how could there be any resolution for freedom to be as real as necessity, which both life and the word of God make so apparent! Thus as we have seen in I Thessalonians 5:9-10, there IS appointment. It is a sovereign decision of God, and it is not in any way dependent on the relative, inherent spirituality or godliness of some sinners over others. It is as Ephesians 2 informs us, a matter of faith through grace, that is its formulation, and the entire scope of the matter is not of works, whether of will or of performance, the function of the spirit of man in differentiation  from  any other. The ONLY One to congratulate, it is God.

His heart is in it, for His creation, mankind. Thus in Isaiah 48:16ff., we find His yearning, His lamentation, His sorrow, His grief that the wonderful opportunities which He lovingly provided were not utilised.

"O that you had heeded My commandments!
Then your peace would have been like a river,
and your righteousness like the waves of the sea.
Your descendants also would have been like the sand,
and the offspring of your body like the grains of the sand.
His name would not have been cut off, nor destroyed from before Me."

It is precisely the same whether in Matthew 23:37ff. or Luke 19:42ff.. The same intensively passionate divine desire is expressed in Ezekiel 33:11 (and God is no respecter of persons, that is one of His glories, being prejudiced in nothing, but in love seeking all as in Colossians 1:19ff., categorically, and no less in I Timothy 2). You find it in Jeremiah 48, where Moab's failure becomes a matter for a profound divine grief.

Love is like that. It seeks for what it loves, and as in Colossians 1,  it is, in the domain of heaven and earth, on the one hand, and God on the other, the case that God would have all reconciled to Himself,  come to a knowledge of Himself, and repent. It is not only so in feeling, but the case goes to the ultimate depths:

"it pleased the Father, having made peace by the blood of the Cross, to reconcile  all things..."

He has no pleasure in the death of the wicked. He is "not willing that any should perish,"

as II Peter 3:9 amplifies the endless stream of divine utterances to that effect, of which not the least are found in Ezekiel 33:11, Isaiah 48 and Jeremiah 48, and again, in Jeremiah 13:12-17, and other passages noted.

If He  WERE willing that any should perish, as the very nature of His initiating enterprise and so contradicted all His many and varied, principial and historical statements to the contrary (that is, statements in essence and in particular), then He would not be God. He would then be interested in gaining something out of His creation,  the perishing a mere incident in the performance of some sovereign wish, which impacts on His own desire, not the condition of His creation. He would be fulfilling Himself, and love is not like that. Love is interested in giving, not getting. What it gets is gained in purity of resolve with the recipient's need at heart. To be sure, it is the TRUE need of the recipient, not a dreamed up substitute; but nevertheless, it is the need. It is not the need of any soul to be damned. This is not its utmost revelation.

It may of course be its utmost revelation, reflection, such that to  avoid and thwart this would be a derangement of the very nature of the creation in the image of God (which is in thrall to nothing - though in the case of man, there is a limit of no small kind, to this ability to choose - he cannot choose to be a bee, for example: it is a relevant capacity relative to eternity which is the inherent domain, however befouled it has become).

Its destiny however is NOT a matter of an obscure divine will, in  principle, but the fulfilment of its own totally understood and foreknown will; and indeed, to dismiss the point into any kind of obscurity is as wholly contrary to the disposition of God towards His creation, as His word so often attests. He is BOTH utterly sovereign and utterly loving; IN exercising His sovereignty therefore, He does it in terms of what He is, that is, love (I John 4:7ff.): in nothing is He contrary to this.  Resultants of its exercise, when voided by the will  of its object, merely illustrate how apt the love was, that it DID love. They do not deny the reality of the chaste character of the love which does not bypass the creation, but knows it, where  salvation must come, or the odious have its own way and be what it then is.

All is foreknown; nothing is predestinated which is not foreknown (Romans 8:29ff.), and nothing is foreknown that is contrary to the nature, character and kind of Spirit that God is! (cf. Luke 9:55). No,  despite the will of the village not to receive Him, we  find in this Luke instance, that  it was by no means a matter of sovereign power destroying them. There are ways and there is knowledge, and no mere flexing of divine muscle is involved in a  mere  reaction.  In the end,  to be sure, what rejects Him has no place in heaven; but He knows who is who, and a passing event is not the determinant, but the divine knowledge which knows in depth the actuality, as indeed it will be shown when those who have heard and seen His words and works, reject Him (John 15:21ff.). If they had NOT,  then they would have had no sin, that is, nothing to the point in the eternal  destiny realm which is the subject of the conversation, and its implied force. Having done so in full knowledge however, their position changes utterly, for whereas without this they had had NO SIN, now they have NO EXCUSE for their sin. Ignorance IS excuse, not for having sinned, but as a ground for hell.

The Westminster Confession accordingly excludes from assured damnation those who have some natural impediment such as intellectual inadequacy. That principle is biblical. Foreknowledge has already settled such things with the normal divine discrimination. What  may be unknowable to man, has the assured knowledge of God.  Again and again one runs into  'problems' which have no other ground than this, that the ground being God, for the entire assemblage in view, this is ignored, dismissed or by come possible cultural tic, forgotten! It  MUST be remembered. NO model should be forgotten in ANY part of it when it is applied. How much more is this the case when the infinite God, who is self-revealed, and through His works attesting, is  concerned! The fact that this biblical model is the truth in no way limits the need to apply it faithfully; but rather the more emphasises this fact!

It is as in John 3, the case that as far as the world on the one hand, and God on the other, is concerned, that this our GOD SO  loved  this world, the thing He made as in John 1:3, so that nothing that is made was made without Him, on the one hand, and all things were made by Him on the other. To what extent ? It is to the point that He gave  something for it. What ? His Son.  Who is that ? It is His only begotten  Son. It is His ALL in this domain, and it is not a creation but an incarnation. The depth of the love is certified and not subject in any way to confusion.

The purpose is stated. It is this, that anyone who believes in Him should not perish. Rather is it that eternal life should come. To be sure, it is not to those who do not believe that this life comes, but neither is it irrelevant to any, as if it were only to some in the world that this love came. It is as generic as the world on the one side, and God on the other, a thing Colossians 1:19ff. makes dramatically clear, even with some repetition. Words cannot make it any clearer.

That is why passages like this in  Colossians, divinely affirmed past all contention, impassioned, pure, holy, wonderful, pure, the very acme of love as self-defined from God, with John 3, are to the glory of God to the uttermost, removing misconception, alerting delight and showering on mankind the glory that is given, from the heights to the depths (cf. Isaiah 7), from a love which is just as enormous as Ephesians 3 assures in its delight. There is no way you can contain it at all!

The  scope of His love is incontestable from these scriptures; the quality of it is no less; the object of it is specified; the outcome  desired is not obscure. Embracive is the love, and what hinders, as in John 3:19, is but one thing, has but one pith and point, substance and shame. It is the preference of those, to whom this love is statedly directed, for something other (John 3:19). THIS is the divinely dictated cause, ground, assignable reason and disruptive element for such  love as just described. He would have ALL things in heaven and earth, yes ALL reconciled  to Himself. If you contradict that, it is nothing to do with the Bible.

To be sure, the foreknowledge and predestination  aspects prevent misinterpretation,  as if mere choice in history, wrought by man and not sought out by God, were the criterion. This is categorically denied in John 1:12. Man is now in no position to act as if autonomous. His is pathology. God's is cure. Yet it is a chaste cure: the patient is not bundled willy-nilly into a waiting theological ambulance.

The matter is forged in heaven before creation, defined in  kind in the word of God,  after the fall, and the whole responsibility in view of the scope of His love leading towards  salvation, is set at man's door.

It would be entirely hideous, not a decretum horribile, as with the depiction and phrase of Calvin*1, who misunderstands, but a desecratum horrible, if God's love were distorted to be something else. As  seems to occur not seldom,  a great  theologian of outstanding gifts, has failed in one point. It is a good reason why I Corinthians 3 should be heeded, and that no one should be named after this school or that, either Apollos or PAUL!! Harmony and truth is not found in the ideas of men, partial or philosophic, but in the word of God which militates against gushing extremes and the lashings of lore (cf. Bay of Islands Ch.2).

That is to say, while Paul had the special, and in this case apostolic gift of being given the pen of the scribe to present the scripture of God in some of his donations to mankind (I Corinthians 2:9-13),  God having chosen him for this: yet this is not a personal fad or preference. You are simply not allowed to name a name and follow it, or give yourself a  theological title based on someone's name, UNLESS that name be Jesus Christ's own name! It is above every name. It is unfortunate that Wesleyans and Lutherans  and Calvinists, for  example,   often break this rule in their nomenclature. It is far worse, however, when they follow, because of such attitudes, not only the excellent features of the gifted theologians in view, but the errors,  as if a gift means that you copy its flaws. God has no such intention for man as that, and decrees otherwise.

It is emphatically NOT a matter of   'the Calvinists' and the  'Wesleyans' or the 'Lutherans' or any other. It is a matter of the Bible CONTINUALLY in every age and time,  and using in humility what help helps, but this towards one active and constant end. That ? it is knowing the meaning of the word of God in the Bible, FROM the Bible, through the grace of God, in the presence of the One who gave it.

It is apparent, when the word of God is not tormented as if by lice, what His will and heart and mind is toward mankind in the abstract, as a race (cf. Titus 2-3). WHEN this and that recalcitrance shows, according to His judgment (and with man the thing cannot go on forever, since he is a limited being - Isaiah 57:15-16),  assuredly God may level hatred (Romans 9) at the sin-bound, will-thwart, cinder of humanity which has not only sinned against truth, but against mercy to the point that the very reception site is ruined! You see that  likewise in Hebrews 6, where someone may taste, but not swallow, play with but not receive the wonders of salvation, being enlightened a little, as in the parable of the seed. This person may have had all this, and yet have no broken heart of repentance to make the seed of the word of God alight and penetrate (Matthew 13:20-21).

This however is like an examination of the course of leprosy. The point at issue is getting it, as in the day when it had no cure, not waiting till it is merely in possession by permission, even inhabiting the very conditions of the cure through dilatory fumblings, rumblings or the like.

God appoints salvation, since man's will  and cognition  and concepts and desires and understanding is in its now natural state,  as fallen, one NOT having an inherent knowledge of God any longer. Now it is in need not only of vision, that it might see, but of vision-receptivity, that it might not see amiss. Liberty must get beyond the corruptions, coruscations,  desires, nature of the SELF in its fallen state, in order to be actual. The determinists in philosophy love to parade such things.  How can the will be free to  will  as it will ? How can it do more than merely express itself as a datum ? whether in this choice or in that.

It can do so, in principle, in two fashions. First, as a product of God, it is able to be aware of God, and of itself, and through the power of God to choose between them. It can be pruned off, or else pruned in order to promote growth. Secondly, in the presence of God, there is no limit to what He can do. How then  does He make liberty for love to be that reality which has Himself apart in grief, if need be for the quality of His operation,  rather than intruding to regenerate whatever He wants ? It is by foreknowledge.

How does that help ? After all, to know in advance, for a man, does nothing to alter what is to be known. If it was known what one would do, how does this give it greater (or less) freedom ?

The point is this. In this model from the Bible, the model of truth, we have someone called God. Exclude Him, and you have no end of problems and mud-pies of philosophy which dirty the hands and do not enchant the soul or satisfy the mind. That is ONE of the testimonies of Biblical Christian Apologetics. If you do NOT follow this model, you are bogged in contradictions, antinomies,  antilogies and such follies as make of many, mere cynics (cf. SMR  Ch. 3, Deity and Design ... Section 8, Predestination and Freewill).

Thus if you start with God, then move to man, then you may find in this way the only possible way for liberty: that is,  that God makes both the programmatic and the personal, and sealing the two, has each in its place. HE is the guarantee not only of the one, but of the other and that is how we have either; for law is no more a derivative of freedom, non-constraint, than is freedom a derivative of law. You cannot logically have either without a sufficient cause. As to liberty, error is its first testimony, since the very concept is meaningless if it could not be otherwise. It comes because of purpose, and its non-fulfilment. When aspiration is IN FACT unrealistic, or obstruction is overwhelming, then liberty is not present, whether in matter, or mind or in spirit.

But error does come, is meaningful and does attest the place of will in purpose.

When therefore you move to the model of the Bible, you find that the foreknowledge, which GOD is able to have, dwarfs that of man. In this case, the inventor of liberty, the formulator of will with cognition and conceptual capacity, God Himself is able to go further with the matter than could the creation itself, whether as man or whatever other body, however instituted. He, the Lord,  is able to know, as an author, the nature of all His products, being unlimited in any capacity, since the God who made creation is not controlled by any part of it, in time or space or causation. What does He know ? He knows the will and mind and nature of man, each one, before the birth comes, before even the birth of creation itself. This is attested directly in such  sites as Ephesians 1:4, Isaiah 46:8.

He is not limited by the onset of sin; He does not HAVE  to  regard the  sorry site of man, of his spirit, post-fall; for knowing it before the fall, He sees it as it is. If then the soul, indeed the very spirit  of man is seen to be set against Him, relative  to its first intimations of response to Himself, or relative to the actualities of its fallen state, whether beyond the intrusive distortions of the disturbance of sin, or in pristine state, whichever way He desires to  approach (and all relevant approaches are always His), indeed in both ways or in any other way which gives comprehensive knowledge of the subject, of any person: then SO it is foreknown. It is not foreknown as the partial  might foreknow, as a mere  fact of eventuation. He can know it as a matter of initiation and reality, past this or that circumstance, trick, deceit or slip. It is not a mutual affair, since before creation it is not there to  act. It is however an intimate affair, since as it will be created, it will be there, and  love does not force.

The Lord makes the determination of discernment,  not direction. THAT is foreknowledge, knowing what it is, and HENCE  grieving when what  love would like, is not to be found. This is not impotence but chastity, the chaste  spirit that given whatever it will in power, yet would never even dream of using it in this one dimension: intruding upon the reality of the will and preference of the other, to control, or contort, or disport or in any way manoeuvre the issue. Similarly, being disposed for a certain quality and result, He COULD have come down from the Cross, called legions of angels, but having the power, yet DID NOT USE IT. The case was not of that kind. In other words, the Lord, like a chemist, but in the domain of freedom, determines the situation - finds out what it is, and applies it. The application is called predestination.

What is found, is bound. Logically, it is found first and then bound, so that the binding is not the point, but how it came to be found, so that it might be bound, and being apt and right, then not confounded.

 It is found in freedom, bound in certainty, so that no slightest failure will be found, as if someone who COULD have been found, is lost. The COULD relates to the open door, not the tainted will's preference, or the ultimate preference as known to God.

HOW can this be done with purity so that freedom is more than a principle ?  There is only one way in which the love can interpret faithfully, without intrusive distortion, the will and mind of the loved one, past the temporary indulgences of flesh, or the flash of momentary desire on the part of the loved. It is in the case where the will and desire and conception  and understanding of the one who loves, is NOT a revelation or application of self-interest in any form. In  THAT case, there would be a distortion on the other side, that of the one who loves,  so that interpretation, EVEN IF carried out in subjective honesty, would be itself subject TO the desires of the heart,  filtered through them, and so an  agency of distortion, limitation, intrusion.

SINCE however, in this model, God is the author of the creation, of its reality and of its image of God aspect in the case of man, He does not contradict Himself as we have often  seen (cf. Sparkling Life ... Ch. 4, Barbs   6  -7).  He does not make liberty in order to subdue it by force, and so negate the nature of the creation. IF and when its usage  leads to the final retort of non-desire on the part of the loved one, so be it: it must have the reality which it prefers, and that in this case, is to be without God. LOve accedes in this to the preference for eternity of the lost, not to impel it, but not to dispel it, despite many entreaties, exhortations and expressions of grief that may be made.

Heaven might be as hell to the one who is allergic to God, aligned to autonomy. If on the other hand, God were to become different, though it is impossible for Him to breach His own integrity*2, being beyond time and decisive desires unmet; and if He were to make of Himself what the one who does not love in return, would love, then there would be no haven for heaven, and none would ever find it. It would not be there. Truth has no counterpart, and love has no alternative.

Thus you need,  for  love to have liberty, to have in the God who made us, One who has no allegiance to mere self-gratification in terms of intrusion, but who knows the reality without confusion. These are natural, normal, and indeed necessary aspects of the final and ultimate source of all creation. Confusion would indicate a diminution of power relative to sight, while selfishness to have just what He wants without regard to truth, would merely  mean a self-contradiction between His making and His using, a defect in the personality which would then be seeking fulfilment by what is beyond it, and so in itself, deficient, defective, misaligned in power and capacity.

Unselfish disregard of merely personal desire, as a criterion, as if to indulge an appetite, rather than pursue truth and peace and love and mercy: This is precisely what He has in the biblical model. In I Corinthians 13, we find that love does not seek its own. Its charity and clarity is beyond that. IN seeking for the lost to be found, the misaligned to be restored to their creation  capacities, understanding and knowledge, God is pursuing the alignment of creation, so that like Himself, but in a far less  expansive way, the souls made  might  align and choose  and understand what they do. This is love and the cost in securing such a free result that it does not even depend on education or prior understanding or differential capacities or contributions (cf. I Corinthians 1:30), but only on what is in fact the will (John 3:19) as the obstacle to salvation, as known to God, on the preference of the one loved, being infinite, the gift is no less. John 3:16 tells of this,  as does Philippians 2.

How is that cost paid ?: it is in that God as we saw in Ch. 1 above, became one of us in format that He might IN IT bear justice for our faults, and then make restoration not something of our  attainment, but HIS. All this is borne by Him.

It is only the God who has absolute foreknowledge as described above, absolute purity of heart, absolute love of what is created, in its outgoing thrust, in its journey of oversight, who makes it absolutely independent of the differential contributions of the variable capacities of man,  who is able to produce this result: namely, the liberty of love in the love of liberty.

This He has done. This He has stated and shown He has done as in Colossians 1:19ff., John 3:15ff., and He has provided for it.

Here is liberty in its created clothes, its  defects of fallen nature overcome in a way that is unique because, quite simply, firstly, there is only one God, and secondly, He is like that.

We are like this because He is like that. The two are correlatives. Because He is like that, therefore we are like this. Since we are like this, there is no  solution except in returning to the One, in thought for understanding and in heart for restoration, who IS like that. Since we are His creation, this is the only solution, the reasonable solution, and He being the  God of all power and the One from whom whatever is not God, IS made (in its original  state, whatever, later, created will elects to do with itself), it is the natural solution. It follows as light from the sun. If the sun or its ilk  were not there, it would be very strange to find things done precisely as if it were.  Since it is there, and were unchanged, it would be very strange to find out what it does, to be absent.

If God were not there, it would be more than passing strange to find the realities of man and his preferences, love and overseeing  perspectives, to be present, as so manifested, man not being  entirely insane. Since He is there, it would be even stranger to find man without these powers  and perceptions, orientations  and expectations. There is not only a proportionality, but more aptly, a propriety, that of reality.

There seem, therefore, in this realm of predestination and  liberty, to have been two major causes of that murky confusion which fails to resolve the ingredients of the case rationally. The first is trying to use a model without the God who is there, so that it is like getting orange juice on a squeezer, without the orange. This is the normal naturalistic folly. On the other hand, there is the alternative. Many indeed  go to the model of God in the Bible, but do not take ALL of it, or distort it. Thus some, like Calvin, have a decretum horribile, a horrible decree, as if God could do such a thing without being such a thing. God's statement that He is love has no place for the horrible, nor does the divine lament in its hearty depth and almost wistful lamentations for those ultimately lost suffer such an perspective. Nor, for that matter,  do His principial statements on the topic permit, as so often shown on this site, such a molestation of His reputation.

The predestination  FOLLOWS from the foreknowledge which in its action incorporates the will, ways and working of  this Being, God, accurately revealed in Jesus Christ as in so many scriptures beforehand in the Old Testament. IN predestining, God follows as in Romans 8:29ff. what He has foreknown. That is the order, the logical order (since time is a creation, the kind we have, and God is beyond it in Himself, just as we are beyond the book which we write, with however much empathy for those whom we create).

IN foreknowing, ALL that God is in involved  and has its way. WHAT this is, is as  revealed and shown in the Bible. THAT involves the love which seeks, but does not force, and which laments and is not lordly in dictation, direction or acquisition by alteration. What is, is what is loved, and it is not something else to be made (Romans 5:8ff.), which is loved. THAT is the result of the love which has no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that it should turn:  yet does not make it do so, for then there is no lament.

The sovereign of sovereignty is God, and God is who He is, and this is what He says, and has shown in Jesus Christ. This is neither One who awaits the mere pleasure of the moment of man,  though the outcome of His foreknowledge  may allow it many aspects in history, nor is He One who makes another being out of something else, in order that He may first gain and then love that, in a super-sovereign manoeuvre.   He is gracious, humble, on the one hand, and knows absolutely on the other. He does not exclude from time what He has foreknown, but allows it  to surface on earth as He will, in terms of integrity and the more certain seeking in heaven. In so doing, He helps to bring understanding to many, as they survey the scene of history, in terms of His word.

Liberty is assured; love is assured; certainty is assured; knowledge is assured; there is nothing of an iron irrelevance to suffering. There is the utmost provision  for its  termination without reckless submission to  renegacy, or unyielding avoidance of pity. Into the realm of suffering, pain and torment, comes the free gift of eternal life. Into the warped will of man comes the foreknowledge of those who  receive Him in reality; and none is lost. There is no scope for hypocrisy, nor any loss to the ample and abundant purity of heaven. In  HIS  selection, called  election,  HIS will does it; but IN doing it, it is the will of the God of all pity and grace  who WOULD HAVE all to be reconciled to Himself. THIS is what pleased  Him; NOT something other or  alien.

It is necessary in resolving spiritual bog areas,  made so by much illicit traffic, to KEEP to the highway of the word of God. It is a model that is that of reality, and any divergence leads to the land of dreams. This may be interesting to some, but it is the objective and not the subjective, what is true of God by His own word, which is before us. ONLY this COULD solve the issue. As noted, it is no coincidence that it does.

Let us therefore possess our possessions, and rejoice that in the word of God, the Bible, and in the God of His word, the everlasting King of  glory and of grace, there is the ready solution of needless philosophical and distorting theological bogs. It is THERE, written. It is to be taken ALL,  without preference or philosophical sophistication, as if to annul part of the word of God by the word of man, in his ignorance and presumption. What it is, and this alone, what is written, gives the entire key to the entire question; and what further may be found, will be found only in the same place. Here only are the conditions of rationality met, by the actualities of what made it, God Himself. They are met in His words about particular events, in principle, and they require not that one restrict, truncate that word by human assumption, but apply it by conscientious fidelity. THEN, one gathers the results and rejoices. This is the 'method' of following the word of God, and NOT leading it!

When this is done, you come to the glorious harmony of truth, the utter peace of rest and the worship of the One who being like this, is yet one's very own Saviour and Lord.

 

NOTES

*1

See for example: Christ's Ineffable Peace ... Ch.    2,

The Glow of Presdestinative Power Ch. 4,

Christ Incomparable ... Epilogue,

Celestial Harmony for the Terrestrial Host Ch. 2.

 

*2

See

Acme, Alpha and Omega: Jesus Christ,  Ch. 8.