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CHAPTER 6

  THINGS THE SAME,

GOD, GOSPEL, REPENTANCE, REDEMPTION, ETERNAL LIFE

and

NOT THE SAME,

MULTITUDES OF WAYS OF VIEWING

THE ONE GOD OF ETERNITY AND INFINITY

LIKE DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF A BUILDING

• BUT THIS, IT IS NO BUILDING, FOR IT IS ETERNAL

THE INEFFACEABLE GOD

PERSONAL, PURE, OMNIPOTENT, IMMUTABLE

Never Outfaced
Once in Christ, out of love,  Defaced
Never Defiled

In Hosea 12:10, God tells us of the sickness of Israel in one peculiar feature. MULTITUDES of WAYS, forms, imageries have been used in  telling Israel of its sins, needs and cure; but they have not been heeded! It is like a kindergarten teacher showing young Johnny about numbers, trying to inculcate into his dreamy world, the whole concept of number. Now she is practical, appealing to his sense of need, now she is exuberant,  leading him to a voyage of discovery in a new land, now she inserts numbers in a natural seeming way into a story; then she has a story in which a particular number becomes the whole point. She draws picture of numbers, has faces put on them, has them interact as a family, and so on and on, as she seeks to make more and more stable, inbuilt and appealing, this whole realm.

So in Hosea12, we learn that the Lord has been showing Israel what it needs to know, the land of spirituality and enthusiasm, simplicity for those who tune in, abstract horror to those who remain isolated in their dream world. The Lord reminds them of His deliverance of the nation from the thrall, the appalling servitude in Egypt, of the Exodus,  that He has led them out as He now wishes to lead them on, not just in a land, but in intimate, realistic, empowered, victorious and pure relationship with Himself.

In essence, while learning is at the heart of it, learning in the heart is the essence of the matter. It is not that a whole  realm of knowledge is not involved, for God is infinite and His understanding is infinite, and all things whatever made, were made by Him, from whom man departed in a mystic malady of sin, embracing  ambition and sedition in one woeful  folly, doubting God and  even trying to become competitive. Such was the way of Genesis 3 and the fall; and while it is not possible to repeat this, for innocence is lost only once, it is possible to repeat the essence of it, the spirit of it gaining the ascendency in more and more explicit ways.

Thus some did not sin in a way identical with Adam's sin, but they sinned in the same spirit (Romans 5:14). They all needed one  answer, that of the son of woman on the human side, who would crush the Satanic power which spiritually had been man's come-uppance, and downfall! That was the promise of Genesis 3:15. It is this which Paul is focussing here, including the fact that the lost innocence, indeed the wallowing in sin is not irremediable, just because the first state is not regained. The lost position is not recoverable, but its results are remediable. Indeed the remedy gives even more, for whereas the first test filed,the quest of Christ in redemption has  already passed, and triumphed, and the gift of God is available on repentance and faith in Him, as He is, for what He has done.

What was innocent, now sinful, can be replaced with redemption, and the righteousness (which in man is PERSONAL, unlike mere restitution of a car's folding engine) that is needed, that glow and show of rightness in the presence of God in companionability and friendship, that kinship, is restored by receiving a gift, just as the gift of innocence was lost.

Thus Romans 5:17 has this (bold added):

"For if by one  man's offence, death reigned through the one,
much more those
who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness
will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ."

It is necessary to go back to first things,  viewing history's loss with its later donation, in Christ,  who died the just for the unjust,  to bring us to God (II Peter 3:18).

One of the first requirements is humility WITH WHICH to face in realism, the need for repentance, and to face the actualities of one's life before God, where He has not ruled, His commandments have been as if far-off stars, of interest perhaps or even some information, but without binding authority in one's life,  so that faith has no harbour and life no foundation.

Thus in Hosea 13:1, after the challenge of Hosea 12:10, telling of HOW MANY RELATED WAYS God has used to stir their hearts and awaken their minds, we read this:

"When Ephraim spoke trembling, he exalted himself in Israel;
but when he offended through Baal worship, he died.
Now they sin more and more, and have made for themselves moulded images."

'Baal' or Lord, is another naturalistic way of have religion. It was associated with debased and immoral practices. It was substitute for God, although some  'god' of the old and basic Creator-Redeemer worship, could be added,  like salt, to the spiritual stew, according to  taste. It is a simple but profound pathology: you have no time for the absolute sovereign (nowadays there is a growing movement to make absolutes in morals and religion an offence! a matter already conspicuous in the 1970s in Victoria^*1).

Frowning on the absolute God, far from Him, perhaps even legislating against having anything of this kind taught, or at least as if it were true! man thus tries to  make another less demanding, more manipulable base for life and for living, one in which you have input,  one whose output you carefully monitor to ensure that it is agreeable to you. Thus the absolute being forbidden, the State becomes absolute, and absolutely prohibits the one and insists on the other, the only real difference being that this is actually and simply an attempt at a coup, a State take-over from  God, pretending liberty and becoming itself in all its puniness, dictator: this without reason or ground, an exercise in pathetic wilfulness. 

People worship stars, sun, 'nature' that  created composition of creativity, which itself does not create except confusion for man when he lets it lead him, as if a man who was given a car, indulged in car-worship, his every waking moment occupied with some filtration from the light of the glory of car-dom, its power, its  means, its  motors, its attainments, its excitement and so on. It is ludicrous, obsessive; and as with all things which take the soul, it is a squandering of what man is for a flirtation with a creation, rather like a little girl obsessed with a doll. There is however nothing playful about it when a grown person is obsessed with natural objects, ideas of the thought of man, cultural mandates, passions and positions, replaced God with some obtrusive, extrusive or even hidden 'god' of their lives, for which they live in ignorance and temporary satisfaction.
 

EXTENSIVE ARE THE NEEDS FOR MAN,
FOR EXPRESSION TO GIVE PERSPECTIVE AND UNDERSTANDING:

so here on this site, there are hundreds of volumes...
based on ONE volume, and ONE Lord

To deliver them from this triviality and being them back to the truth, far more exalted and vastly more humbling (for until you get back to the ground, you are merely in the clouds, nubilous, nugatory, with a psychological needle permanently installed in your mortified arm), NUMEROUS ways were chosen by God, as we see in Hosea 12:10. In multitudes of images and presentation He proceeded, He communicated, if by any means the patients might be awakened before the transfer from the spiritual hospital of religious raving, to the inglorious rest of the morgue, inheritor of pathology, next door.

Could a glorious rest which is the source of a spiritual vitality, since God is back of it, ground for it and donor of it, could this be found ? Christ Jesus invited to this rest, from which the vitality of reality could proceed in friendship with Himself (Matthew 11:27-30). GOD is personal, we are personal, rest is personal and no pill can produce it, no appliance, pleasure,  self-assertion or imagination, neither psychological nostrum nor social remedy having any relevance, being only palliation for  selected  problems, at best.

How serious is this lapse from the Lord, so often the lot of the 'black sheep' of the family! It is now increasingly the work of the majority, scorning marriage, experimenting with the equipment of procreation as if a right - we even had a judge apparently seeking to take control of a young man's life, so that instead of having some religious 'restriction', which the judge abhorred, he could wallow in sexual experimentation. It is all symptomatic of death, of severance from the source of human spirit, power, purity, beauty of holiness, meaningfulness, reliability and choiceness. As in ancient Israel,  so now (Hosea 13:13) : "The iniquity of Ephraim is bound up; his sin is stored up. The sorrows of a woman in childbirth will come upon him." It is true that this is a double 13, yet  it is not this which makes it notable, but rather the stressful horridness of the state to which life had fallen,   and the mortality of its penalty.

After all, how COULD man have meaning, how COULD it be found, the beautiful symmetry of man's mind as created in the divine image, and God's own mind which so created him, the enticing fields of discovery based on the Creator who stirred so many of the most famous scientists in human history by His underlying power, causative creation and majesty, laws and modes: how could the place of man be found if he left it! It CAN be refound by the fact that the God of creation has all that any father or mother ever had of personal and individual love, with a purity and power both overwhelming and magnificent.

"I will ransom them from the power of hell; I will redeem them from death.

O Death, I will be your plagues! O Hell, I will be your destruction,"

Hosea 13:14.

The term for  'Hell' here (as in Psalm 9:17), may also be translated 'grave' in the sense of a lostness that is both spiritual and destined, signifying in essence, a final detachment from grace, goodness, meaning and the flow with the clear waters of understanding. The condition is the same.

It is a select, destiny for the woefully and determinedly godless, where what they are not becomes more apparent than what they are; for they are denatured, as indeed, their preceding lives without God, declare. While there may be hope for those who have never heard the Gospel, if God in His foreknowledge has so organised it (cf. John 15:22ff.), for it is clear that BECAUSE those Jews to whom Christ spoke HAD heard and seen what He did, THEREFORE their guilt became irremediable; and moreover, in His knowledge is the work of love and whatever is the blessed result in His eternal domain, for none is ever lost who might in truth and reality, be found, such is the love of God (Colossians 1:19ff.). Similarly,  for those who prefer darkness to light there is only night.

You are not forced into heaven, and even if you were, your detestation would be its own hell. God knows better than so to pollute heaven; but none is ever lost for a lack of love in God, and the final severance waits on the refusal in heart, known to God before all time, the one that WILL NOT BE REMEDIED! (cf. Matthew 23:37ff., Luke 19:42ff.).

These things being so, and the love of God so profound, His wisdom so infinite, His compassion so tender, His judgment so ineluctable, truth so inexhaustible and pure, reality so unmanipulable, heaven and hell so terminal, the sins of man so vicious to his own best estate, the follies so mordant: there is many a way of presenting His various features, foci, words, intimations,  explanations. There is one Gospel, one Bible, one Saviour, one God and it is He who saves; but there are many ways of approach, aspects of His work, ingredients in His grace, wonders in His paths.

Numerous are the fields, subjects, disciplines, themes, topics.

Moreover, since He is both personal and infinite, it is all but inexhaustible, such a field, such a theme, such a narration, such an  application; for He of whom it speaks is not only infinite beyond man's little creatureliness, but being personal with it, intriguing, fascinating, glorious. The whole realm of mathematics, in its profundities, is merely ONE PHASE of the created actualities which He has made, with which creation is imbued, and for which the mind of man is prepared so that what is to be found in the one, is mirrored in the methods of what does the finding of its like, man's investigating spirit. What teaching, what insights, what inspiration can guide the informed mathematician; but this, it is far greater; for  it concerns its source, together with the source of man's very mind, and heart! It is not only law's base but freedom's maker!

HENCE on this site, while it may by some be felt that the topic continues unchanged, in fact  there is  rehearsal of this and that, and study is made where is the difference between the fall and the thrall of sin in philosophy and the psychological and other ingredients, in the guilt of man, on the one hand,  and the glory of God and His will and wonder on the other; and in view of this, it relates to what is the way of reaching to Him! THAT is the same. Indeed that expression of a sense of sameness, that is precisely the sort of comment that might be made by one with an unmusical ear.

What is this business of music! such a person might exclaim.  Why, one of this mind might ask, do they perpetually talk  of Bach, and Handel, and Grieg, and Mozart,  Mendelssohn, and so on, and listen to this and that, let alone examine what was said, felt or experienced or the results, constantly speaking of  the spirit, the lilt, the instrumentation, the codas, the style, the meaning and method and so on, as if they had nothing better to do! Have a tinny!
 

THE CALL IS ONE OF EMERGENCY, NOT EMERGENCE ,
AND IT CONTINUES IN THE LOVE OF GOD

Say what you will, there are profound depths and significations in music, and it has its own messages, media and strength.

If then this is merely one feature and element of the artistry and mentality of man, and so much can be found it as in mathematics on the other side, and blindness or deafness merely exhibits ignorance, insensitivity or outage, what then of the Maker of all! Nor is this all. Since man has destiny, being great as a creation, his heart and mind and spirit and soul so impressionable and manipulable, but not so by necessity, it is vital for him to awaken to his state and estate, meaning and destiny.

It is crucial for him to study himself and know his end and point, purpose and place. If not, it is mere imagination or desire that leads him; and then the  folly of it, to know much but not what is his own place, is immeasurable! If however man is to know anything at all stable and true about himself, he needs to know the factory from which he was engendered, and the source of the DNA which does it, who wrote it, whose commands it embodies, as it continues to create on the KIND basis that is man, generation by generation, like an invisible factory, whose creative and created codes for continuity of kind, are now discovered, operating for thousands of years, since it was built.

God excoriates unblissful ignorance in Ecclesiastes 11:

"Rejoice, O young man, in your youth!

And let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth;

Walk in the ways of your heart,

And in the sight of your eyes;

But know that for all these things
God will bring you into judgment.

Therefore remove sorrow from your heart,
And put away evil from your flesh

For childhood and youth are emptiness."

If you put nothing into them they are empty. If you do not find while they last, their point and purpose, and follow naturalistic programs or imagined gods, it is not as if 'nature' has its laws and you don't! Be advised, and find the God of your creation before sin finds you out, and your self-dominion becomes an unpleasant funeral note for your soul!

Will a doctor ignore the sick, a teacher the ignorant, a butcher the empty, a compassionate member of the public, someone struck down at his right hand ? Will he not diligently act to seek a remedy ? May it not include many elements,  First Aid or instruction or an ambulance, and each one with various additives and inputs ? How much more does one who sees the plight of people, warring with their God, who is such NONETHELESS despite rebellion, contempt or folly on man's part, seek by MANY images and MULTIPLIED perspectives of the ONE TRUTH, in its full infinitude, that of the PERSONAL God, to bring rescue while there is still hope. Will one not then use this way and that, introduce this form, formula or format or that, to awaken, inform and instruct,  appeal and enable as far as may be, what will deliver some as man migrates to his eventual home.

It is ONE Gospel from ONE Bible^*2, in which ONE God by various means has brought His mind to bear on man, and to present the need of man in the Bible, a work of some 3500 years of operation, covering the spiritual depths of history and the heights and basenesses in variable destiny for man. There is none like it, verified in time, in years, in centuries, in millenia. Many are the aspects, many the orienteering means, many the principles, laws, much the love, grace and righteousness to be received and vast is the field of its coverage, enormous the grace of the provision for man, historical in application right to the cross of Christ as foretold, testable its presentations in life and mind, in society and in the wantonries of man, who tries it out like an aggressive student the laws of his school,  by flouting it!

Wars are an explosive from its disregard, anguish an implosion from its dismissal.

If it seems the same, every aspect, all its knowledge, every field involved, then  it is just that as in Encyclopedia Britannica, it is a vast dealing with a topic: in that case, information. Here it is the source of information and its meaning, basis and acme, God Himself who is the central focus. This is far greater, since the source FOR knowledge by whose knowledge the opportunity for knowledge is able to be created, as topic has infinitude, whereas products are finite. It is not man's opinion of God which matters, but God's opinion of man. Without truth, there is verbiage, but not necessity.

If then in the process, the testimony becomes larger than that Encyclopedia, it is because its topic is expansive beyond all comparison, the One from whom alone information can be equated with truth, whose love, mercy, truth and wisdom are more essential to man than air. Expansive though it is, it is intensive, self-revelatory, inscribed in divinely chosen words, attested in heart, mandatory for spirit, invulnerable to argument, the lead for history, the explication of the binding mysteries of mesmerised man. It does not alter. Truth has no need to do so!

The other reason for any such impression is this: that the GOSPEL is not only always the same since its first proclamation in preparatory form in Eden (Genesis 3:15), but it is the SOLE METHOD of finding peace with God. If someone needs a hospital, then it is useless to speak too much about holidays in a Pacific Island, except in passing. You have to get to the point. It is not, says Paul in Galatians 1, a matter of seeking to persuade God about man, what he may want, but persuading man about God, what He has done for him and how he may find it and live in it, and rejoice in God, not in gods that are not there, the empty echoes of a fallen heart, that insists on remaining forsaken.

In the defence of the Gospel (Philippians 1:7), what field is irrelevant ? and in its confirmation, what may be finally omitted ?

One further reason for any such impression of invariability, and it is potent,  is this: that the GOSPEL is not only always the same since its first proclamation in preparatory form in Eden (Genesis 3:15), but it is the SOLE METHOD of finding peace with God. God knows His own mind, and speaks. Is every political mountebank to be heeded even in blatant and imperious mischiefs, or weak driftings, each with a mind of his or her own, and is God then to be imagined to lack even the decisiveness of man since He is infinitely greater! He does not alter. It does not change. The need for change is in man, not in God.

If someone needs a hospital, then it is useless to speak too much about holidays in a Pacific Island, except in passing. You have to get to the point. It is not, says Paul, a matter of seeking to persuade God about man, what he may want, but of the persuasion of man about God, what He has done for him and how he may find it and live in it, and rejoice in God, not in gods that are not there, the empty echoes of a fallen heart, that insists on remaining forsaken. THAT is why Paul in this same locale, now focussed, declares that the Gospel might be changed, if the changer, be it angel or apostle, is to be accursed! but it is in fact immutable, the criterion and the crisis resolution, for man the reality. It is more so than any natural law; for it is supernatural information, attested for millenia, as man is imbued by the Spirit of God, sought out as it is applied, and finding God by this means, meeting with rest in reality; and this also, it does not change. It merely deepens.

If, therefore,  there were any sense of variability in the treasure presented - as distinct from profundity of its focus, the Lord Himself, and the wonder of its magnificent kindness - that would in itself be a source of concern!  But the Lord's concern is from His mind and heart, and it is knowledgeable from the first, unchanged to the last, focussed in the Redeemer, Jesus Christ, who before all men has done and said such as no man has done, and left for the occasion of human history, till the call to termination comes, for this world as for any individual,  that one Gospel, higher than the heavens, deeper than hell, intense, practical, final.

Here is perspicuity, vitality and wisdom; here is life itself, even for ever (I John 5:11ff.). They attempted change on Christ, and did manage to change His countenance so that it was disfigured more than man, as if to make it a raw mess (Isaiah 52:12-15); but He changed the  changes in the resurrection of that same body on the very third day which He had declared, and had been declared before He came. Man is puny in his rebellion; but God is glorious in His patience, though it be not for ever (II Peter 3:9, Isaiah 57:15ff.); yet His eternal life, that is!

NOTES

*1

See on absolutes and society, education and governmental action:\

Lead Us Not into  Educational Temptation.

*2

On the identification of the only authorised written communication of God to mankind, see SMR, TMR,  Deity and Design, Designation and Destiny and

LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST

WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES

AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS.

For its contents, see also this presentation.