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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE PLAN OF GOD

Oh, he said, I'll have nothing on a plate that is not there, with no sauce, thanks,
for I find this does not cause indigestion.

Yes, said the waiter, but that is a very costly dish.

 

GOOD FOR NOTHING

Atheists are good for nothing. That is to say, they are exceedingly good, in principle and at times in practice, at dealing with nothing and clever in indicating how nothing deals with them. There is nothing to it. And of course, in the end it comes to nothing, where it began, out of logical necessity, for nothing has neither potential nor future, or it would be something with a future or potential.

It is however not a matter of sweet nothings, for it is anything but sweet.

It seems to bog down either in purposeful self-institution, so that it can be a thing of nothing to be, that is, to exist; or drawing from vast technical and creative resources attributed to it - through nothing and from nothing since it all IS nothing - it moves in turn to make matter, its architecture, its functions, its laws, its energy relationship by law and so on and on, till just in a nothing, a momentary moment, time having come from nothing, there is space, space having come from nothing. With this, there is given attention to all the molecular laws and the paraphernalia to which the periodic table pointed, the gas laws, the micro-dots, which on expansion are a coded language, a language for life, to the missions, the messages, the construction utilities which we all carry about with us.

These  at times find their issue in babies, or books, or bashings or smashings, as the spirit of man moves is moved and the mind's suggestions and the imagination's work or lack of it, work on or within it all. The spirit crafts the immaterial, consulting the mind supplied, being causatively competent, as the Eternal was and is for many or whatever He will.

What then of these human proclivities and products ? These are variable depending on the case, as persons try to do something about the spiritual powers of man, within, through which each activates his mind to his intent. So man works in his turn, to create, true to type, though himself subordinate, as constructed.

However with man we return to rationality. It is then that he, though derivative in nature, from his creativity derives things, making these a second derivative: that is, man is a being derived from deity and from him AS THERE, much is derived. Deity does not put man there, or any part of his mind or the matter, time, space and multiplied communications and semi-automata, as NOT there, but He does so as always there; nor does man write sonnets as if not there, but put there. What produces is either eternal or produced. Existence precedes activity! No existence, no activity.

Creator and created being, each has the sort of existence logic demands to be there, whether in eternity without being made and so the ultimate basis of any  and all, or in time, since made. God moreover cannot be assembled in parts, since these simply require far more wit and wisdom than merely making parts for man, and understanding of the making of understanding in derivative beings. Requiring it moreover of what is not there, as its base and agency for production, is simple a logical foozle, bad, invalid, senseless, useless, a verbal waste of time, in time, made itself by the Timeless, for whom time is one of His own inventions.

This is way beyond any assemblage by man, who produces merely activistic oddities, or conformities, bound by whatever direction or indirection emplaced by him, to his will within the setting for his will, from the Eternal. The principles of creativity are scarcely onerous: BE there to create, have creative power and not only desire, but determine to use it, and then use it. It is like a gun: if you have it, you can use it; if you throw it away it may still go off, but not for you.

As man makes, engendering with labour, so he is made. As he produces, so he was produced. As he was induced, so he induces. But the one, the mini-creator,  is from what has placed him as a part of one whole, though a personal and individual part able to understand, and the other is the work of man, the derivative. He has been given understanding BY understanding that understands not only understanding, but how to confer it on inventions, such as man constitutes.

The creative Creator needs no placing, but being there, enables anything, as He will. If He wills to create what is in any way unbonded, then He may suffer from its freedom; but if He wills to create what in willing, may love or not, be evil or not, then bounders may arrive together with those responding to love. Since without scope for love, you do not even have persons, let alone the personal above mere principles, programs or controls, God in making man free to reject Him and inject inadequate substitutes, created the scope for evil; but knowing all, had prepared the scope for its overcoming without mere dictation. This is a magnificent pearl in the Divine Jewellers, beyond man: for the making of man is beyond man, nor did he have any part in it. It is the old principle: you have to be there, to do ANYTHING.

Unfortunately for the atheist, begging the question in bits is no more possible, logically (and logic purportedly came from nothing, especially its rules of validity, which underlie operations), than begging it once and for all. Moreover,  logic being indispensable for argument, including the ludicrous laws of nothing, (articulated above in part), the breach is anywhere one that is fatal.  "What are you doing, Smith," asks the teacher. "Oh nothing!" says the child! But this definition of nothing is mere abuse of words, in exact configuration with the atheist philosopher, dabbler in origins or dynamic in double dealing, deploying nothing as the universal source, with more sauce than structure.

It is NOT nothing which decrees with Darwin's underlying thrust,  that process is all. Did nothing make the setting, the format, the potential for elevation, even the concept of elevation, the phases like mind and spirit, the logic, the correlation of logic IN MAN'S MIND and LOGIC in the universe, in terms of which it may be, and is, with relish investigated ?

Did it contrive the far past human miniaturisation methods in DNA, and the concept of communication, and that of mind, so that in exceedingly notable meanings and word-to-object specifications, it might designate things, and that things might be designable, having the same susceptibility to reason as the human mind to reasoning ? and the same necessity of mental conferment, symbol and substance, defined and detailed, functional and constructive!

Can you specify what a term MEANS ? Yes because you deal in meanings; and such is the nature of our coded language for generation by generation, as zygotes become babes and babes the fully formed and conformed prodigies called people. Terms and meanings legislation is a mental and imaginative pursuit, and not only do we show it, but it WORKS in us, when we father or mother a child. It is like working in a factory, and not knowing it.

What then do we find, and have we found ? As man makes, engendering with labour, so he is made. As he produces, so he was produced. As he was induced, so he induces. But the one, the mini-creator,  is from what has placed him as a part of one whole, though a personal and individual part able to understand; and the other is the creator is the one whose work is man, the derivative. This other needs no placing, but being there, enables anything, as He will. If He wills to create what is unbonded, then He may suffer from its freedom; but if He wills to create what in willing, may love or not, be evil or not, then bounders may arrive together with those responding to love.

Provocateurs and deluded, those impassioned with the pathologies of inflamed imagination contrary to reality, all may work out their follies, and there is scope at the will of the Creator, to work out and in wisdom provide the solution for His creation, mankind. Many will accept it, engraced into love; many will reject it, forever alien. Since without scope for love, you do not even have persons, let alone the personal above mere programmatic principles, God in making man free created not only the scope for evil; but knowing all, had prepared the scope for its overcoming without mere dictation.
 

TURNING SOMETHING INTO NOTHING GOOD IS FAR EASIER

Is it nothing to you that this option of wallowing in pollution-infested non-thought has become the vehicle back not only of space war (moon as basis ? hmm ... in what sense will it be turned to blood - Acts 2:20 ...), but case war and place war, encasing the thoughts of man in folly, working for his own destruction!

Indeed, in how many senses is the whole splendid operation, really almost a reversal of the popular ideas: in fact, a turning of something into nothing! Making nothing of the Original and Eternal, desiring to be boss or an indulgent remnant within His creation. But this is only mental, spiritual and moral. It does not remove a suitor to reject him; nor God to mock Him.

So coming from nothing (1) and making nothing of the One from whom the universe comes (2), these are two negatives that do by no means cancel each other out! It is man in the end who suffers, though God Himself suffered much to rescue any.

Accordingly,  as the former is a contradiction in terms, so the latter is a commission for labour; for the guilt is irremovable except by Him who made us, against whom the peculiar action or inaction is set. It is then that something needs to be realised. Nothing is not the start and nothing is much less than the end, though this be either good or nothing at all good! Delusion and fantasy is no place for soundness and estimable destiny, but for regress and a shattering collision.

So the world of alleged nothing grows into envisaged negation (Matthew 24:22). The blinding of logic however does not effect the binding of results. It still works though man pretend it absent. Mercifully, God having worked, presents what now as ever works, having foreseen and provided in the love which permits rebellion and enables pardon.

Consider then. The universe, man, this entirety is a product in the first place of exacting and inventive thought that conceives conceptions and impels them into practical action. It exists by correlation of power and will, wit and wisdom, desire and determination. It wanders by dissidence from its bounds, but the structure does not wander, only the persons and their relationship to the  rest of the creation and its Creator. The universe is an effect, though a freedom billed one, and it has effects when man uses this amiss, and far more so, when he confuses what he is, misuses what is provided and ignores the instructions, not only as found in his DNA, as in sexuality, in each in billions defining male and female for construction. Even this in the patience of God may be borne in the end, but only on repentance, for love is an affair of the heart, and odium is not its namesake, nor insensitivity, nor yet arbitrariness, unreliability nor hastiity nor egotism, which has concerns enough with itself.

But first man had to be made, and given such wonderful ways and scope for wisdom. Before each generation he witnesses it afresh, before his eyes, as the DNA, though miniaturised to the point of magnificence, continues munificence that it not only HAS the directions for making people from a slither, but proceeds to USE them effectually, programmatically.

Such is this sensational progeny of man, the child, who is himself the progeny of parents, as they of parents, as all of patents which work and are a given - for nothing comes from nothing. All this,  man has received, a fact he frequently tries to cover up, like a criminal under investigation after he has stolen secrets and is using them perilously as he will, frequently without even understanding what they are about.

 

THE GREATEST GRAB IN HISTORY

This thus becomes the greatest grab in history: the grab from God, whose mind made matter and whose will made man, including the will to believe or not what is there, and this whether you like what you find,  or not. This can be argued about only by reason which insists that nothing-itis, that disease which is a mental and spiritual basis of theft of a universe in one of its manifestations, has nothing to do with the reality,  but all to do with its perversion. Indeed, it can accomplish nothing but the delusion of its victims.

Far worse is this than any fever; for it makes spiritual felons of those who indulge and instead of repenting of wilful ignorance, indulge in nothing idolatry, whether in its own terms, or in the ultimate basis of their thought, endowing what is not there with the power to accomplish not only something, but anything.

It is also the greatest delusion in history, the greatest illusion, except that many of its subscribers and devotees seem to have a capacity of non-thought, often being too busy or tired to consider it, being in pursuit of something invisible and imaginative, known as success and survival. It has other options such as importance and security, pleasure and performance, esoteric mystique and brazen dismissal; but all may be cast before it as spiritually estimated and understood without criticism or concern, because it seems so nice, just like drunkenness to the alcoholic.

This from the Bible,  says it: "The fool has said in his heart there is no God! (Psalm 14:1).

Alienation from God is a fundamental pollution of man (Ephesians 4:17-19). Man holds down the truth, and shuts his eyes (Romans 1:17ff., Matthew 13:15) as in the case of many to this day, who reject God, lest they should see and be converted. As it was, so it is; as Christ depicted, so it derides, decides, and as Christ exhibited, in the end, so it acts. You do not have to have a dagger in order to kill in your own heart; but it is not God then, but your own self that is sold, and that, it is by yourself.

So God provided a relief, remedy, restoration procedure, and far more, a provision to ransom man from the fathoms of his drowning in the sea of death, prelude to destiny, for we are not dealing with mice, but man in this survey.

 

CONVERSION NOT CONDITIONING

Be converted ? yes to something. Otherwise having nothing as your father and future, while you sun yourself in so many somethings, it is precisely illusion.

What kind of a something, then ? Something adequate or inadequate for all the things nothing-itis has sought to cover by having things come post-paid from nowhere, and in successive postings arriving too late to integrate, and so leaving a mass of nothings with somethings unco-ordinated and constituting rubbish as a result. Such is progressive in thought but not profitable or functional in fact. It is a fantasy on wheels which slither in the mud of fallacy. Its dysfunctional follies in creation are not found, though they should populate no small part of the earth if true, because they did not happen. That is the essence of the untrue, it may be thought and taught by the belligerent or the bewildered, but though it may be willed as a theme, it may not be built as a product. Hence we do not find the attestation of its endless seeming failures, but even start at the top level of sophistication in the cell.

We do not ever see DNA writing itself without a mind, because it is a symbol-substance duo, and it depends on thought and power and understanding. What we do see, as in the case of Belshazzar, is the writing on the wall, but this is provided, like DNA by the One who has the handle to all things, and what there was shown in words directed to one Empire, is shown to any and all (cf. Ezekiel 21). It can move the mighty to ruin, even when it parades itself.

Indeed, it is not rubbish which seeks to outwit God, though this may be its due destiny. It is a creative source of creativity, whether to slay God or slyly to omit Him, this being imbued with mental dynamism and willing or wilful power to operate.

Since man who makes some of his alienated terms, not with nothing, but with the gods of his own mind and to which his mind may be drawn, has a term called death to meet, while his arcane if not inane protestations have no validity and do not in fact issue from nothing but from rebellion, reality marches on. It cannot be deleted by dreams; it requires that one wake up.

In such devious actions, however, man is also asking to be reduced: if not entirely to nothing, then to something as inglorious as a site for his deliberate delusions and their judgment. Actually there is something to everything, and when you leave cause and effect, you lose logic, which itself requires that you find grounds satisfying to reason, linked to logic, even for the assertions of nothing, which in turn requires something even to be asserted. Leave that, and you have no logical power, not ground or base to argue from or with, and so leave as a clutter in a flutter, self-disenabled from logical place in argument.

The Bible does not do so. It is indicated by logic, uses logic, signifies creation in logical terms, and it has no presuppositions to satisfy, violating nothing in its demonstration (SMR, TMR). It is the divine answer to ruminations, fulminations and mental fidgets, which without the Author of man,  in turn lead to morals based on nothing, in turn wandering on to abuse of the highly sophisticated equipment integrated in man, spirit, mind, body as in matter and the appropriate results. The reason why there is on the one hand, a sophisticated aesthetic, an entrancing order, an enabling legislation for all the myriads of laws on form and function, specifications and maintenance in the universe, and on the other, decline and dynamic which populate both us and our universe, is as with many of our own works.

We create but the product does not perform, or mutinies, or rebels, depending on the kind of product, so that there is the creative and the desecratory.

With this, it becomes more personal. There is also a degenerative dynamic  of the human genome of man over time, as attested by the research on that topic*1 which gives man a limited time before accumulated copying errors, these underlying his bodily presence, generation by generation, indeed his future on this earth. They are linked to his physical format in this cosmos, its place, as if to mock his pretensions and pretences, putting glorious future aspirations of mutinous power, into the pit simply in time! It becomes hard to operate aright or amiss, when your grounds of being depart! That is one of the troubles of rebellious, derivative beings when they lift themselves up in pride and illusion!

Nourish dreams in de-constitution! Confusion and abuse have a beginning in misused freedom and an end in trash, with the alternative, truth through divine intervention. Of this more shortly.

 Indeed, this is simple though profound. Man was made upright but has fallen into many manipulations. That is the essential message of Ecclesiastes 7:29. It declares this, "God made man upright but he has sought out many schemes." Nothing, however, can institute eternity; but God, He can.

What then of Him ? The wonder is His product. The woe is from us. He has created. We have sinned. It is desecrated in the greatest and the least. Whatever,  is behind it all, its cause with the traceable consequences, is the mentally equipped, creatively inclined, Eternal Creator. As to His work in us, nothing at any time in this total sphere ensures its continuance for all time, nothing in itself. Indeed, I protest, nothing may be the illusion, but not the reality or we could not discuss it. It does not matter how far down the line you seek to go with nothing; for just as the first step into somethingness from such a base is mere self-contradiction, fabrication and dissolving imagination, so are all the projected steps along the way, including the way in itself.

What then is sin ? It is departure from the rules and nature and  purpose of the creation which in part we constitute. Must it be wilful ? No, if a drunk kills a man in a speed spree, he still killed him. He did not have to be drunk.

Why should you worry about these rules, some of which are called morals with mankind and for him ?
 

RULES, SOME OF WHICH ARE CALLED MORALS

It is because they apply. It is not a case of N/A. It does apply, ultimately in a prepared death. Is death then the purpose of life ? When a brilliant playwright writes Macbeth, for example, is it too much to speak of purpose and creativity in such as he,  able both to operate and so have these functions co-operate that something to the point in view, actually and actively happens ?

The manifold expressions of purpose in the magnificent attainment of human form, mind and spirit, dripping with self-discipline, actuated by understanding, surpassing in wisdom, surrounded with defences and enhancements, to enable continuance,  are no just base for a concept of playboy follies. If God were afflicted with these or any other pathology of destruction, dabbling and self-will, it would show that this Being was not after all God, but had been created and left inadequate, controlled by a superior power, imbued without His preferred features by HIS maker. Then it is not of the Creator by one created that one speaks, which is irrelevant. That way is self-contradiction, misusing one category for another. So we return to the actual God.

As to the puny being, inadequate, subjected, that being not so, the imagination of such lurks as making man to indulge inadequacies is simply incorrect. It is a contradiction in terms, a fallacy in logical procedure.

Such a God would be misnamed, a fallacy of nomenclature. It is not God who is missing but logic concerning His identity, in that case; and thus the point of life amid man's calamities is not in that distorted domain.

Of God one does not then speak in such imaginings of evil motives, but of a derivative being, such as ourselves. Of this, one does not speak, but instead, of the cause of it all, eternal and final. To such clashes of constitution and desire, He has no relationship. They require a Maker. It all requires its Maker. It is of Him we speak then.

As it is, it is He who is the beginning both of what ends and what does not do so. Logic dies without Him. But He is still there. Constructions in fact and in matching mind are not divorced. Argument ceases without this One.

Since it is He, then He is not capable of being inadequate, and hence of NEEDING to engage in creation for His own fulfilment, like a terrorist, never happy without making others miserable, a liability on legs, not wheels. Nor does He wander into delighting in exploitation to achieve peace or pleasure, since this too indicates lacks within, alike production limits, harassment inheritances. But with God, the Creator, there is none from whom to inherit: if there were, once again, this would be a misnomer, and turning to what is logically required, we would omit such mindless meanders.

WHY then did God create ? It was not so that He might find out something, since that too is a mere whisper amidst reality, a mind uninformed in His own universe. He has created life for living; and death for its miscreancy, its inoperable confusion, its ingredients of wilful collusion with what blights. It was so that we might be blessed in His grace and with His goodness, there being ways that are fitting for us, called morals, spiritual principles, ways for the household of faith and love, in His presence.

This is not the popular current way. The specialisation of arbitrary wilfulness is increasingly paramount to many. We are both seeing and living in the midst of the outcomes, where the ingredients may inherit the rubbish or be redeemed.
 

REDEMPTION IS NOT UNRULY

Redeemed ? Why yes, for life being the purpose, and death the result of evil and inanity and misuse, abuse if you will, and abuse if you won't, then magnificence will rub shoulders with mutiny, marvels with horrors, saintliness with satanicity, the angelic with the diabolical, wisdom with folly; and so it is. Popular also is indifference to everything and anything except elevation (to what ? and with what reason ?), and survival to enjoy it at anyone's expense (whatever it takes), while the very genes continue their decline to a more obvious judgment. This too is a human vagrancy that is popular enough.

As this rubbing of reality with rubbish (in thoughts, morals, self-acclamation, self-fulfilment, meaning, self-centred setting of sights on selfish fulfilments) is infectious to a point, and yields something worse than nothing in the interim (before the bin), what then ? Since this non-nothing is found in terms of torture and lies and programs for self and for illusion so that some might take advantage of others using other things most unlovely and unworkable, and such programs run unabashedly and are often found even elected and selected, contaminating and crushing, in individuals as in nations, what then ?

It is this. There is an end.

In the end amidst this immoral corruption for the purposes of spirit in those who deny spirit, perhaps as the best way to use it in theft of equipment from God: there is action from sources other than man.

When you steal a universe by denying its production (like saying MY Rolls-Royce appeared on the driveway, and where it came from is nothing to do with me, for it cost me nothing!), there are results to be expected. The bin is one, as explained. Redemption is another. That of course depends on the producer of the Rolls Royce. It took work to make it and simply assuming it comes from nothing is nothing to the point.

The only relevant question is where did it come from, who made it and why, and how did it come to be mine, available at will for manipulation and theft ? How is it conceptually a unity, with constitutional conformity both inward, for system, and outward, for operation ? Does it conceive itself before there to do so ?

It is by my hand. Is it therefore mine, like a crown being placed on the King's head, by me ? Does this constitute ownership, or imply I crafted its beauty and dutiful meeting of each conception for its usability, usefulness and use!  For that matter, does occupying a part of a land constitute making it, or owning it, without concern for the will of the One who made it!

One may say then that it is mine in immediate control, though not in such minor details as its CREATION. You can create a lot about creation, like undisciplined children trying to avoid being thwarted in their wilful ways, 'creating' as it used to be called; but you cannot avoid it.

What is in view has criteria which match marvels, not nothing. The entire modelling, parts, integration, laws, forms, formulations, foundations, architecture, machineries and machinations back of their mathematical modellings (like protein packers, mini-machines copied out for each generation's descendants,  and necessary for the entire process) require something. It is either a logical basis or else in the end, the rubbishing of logic, the reasoning behind which would then lack validity, so ending the defence for the theft.

It is a hard world if you demean its contents. Reality is always hard when you ignore it. Clashes are then INEVITABLE, and so this world clashes about which dream to follow, that of

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Hitler, or

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Mussolini (started much better than he finished), of

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Toyo and Co., of

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Stalin, of the anti-intellectual Khmer Rouge (for survival purposes),

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the delusive dreams and irrelevant posturings of of Lenin, of Darwin 
(A Midwinter's Night Dream), of

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Hawking and his universe wondering whether to bother existing
in one of the most monumental question-begging meanders of all time,
or of

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those who want to conserve what they do not observe,
a designed wonder, coddling what is left of the universe
without returning to its creation and His care.

What is needed, in image, is not reconditioning of the ruined vehicle of thought and imagination, will and love known as mankind, the HUMAN race (you can add desecration and wilfulness and immorality and death-wish and desolatory impartation, as you watch the movement of his spirit like winds on the water which may be playful or deadly as they blow).

What then is needed ? It is payment for its plight and purchase of the remnant, not by some philosopher-political ignoramus who happens to be popular for a few decades at most, that is needed. How, you may ask, in passing, could the educated, studious, zestful German people with their Lutheran component ever POSSIBLY be taken by Hitler! Partly revenge, or weakness, or harsh conditions, or delusive hopes, or prone theology in the midst of many churches, or toying with spiritual follies as the artful pleasure of many, and partly the fact that this world, race be it this or that, is of one spiritual texture: it displays vulnerability, either through special weakness or misused strength.

So  it is  payment and purchase that is needed with all the understanding and power to the uttermost. The change must be profound, through the desire and decision of the Creator, against whom and whose work, is the offence, from whom is the dissidence.

There is need to invent this solution, solace, regeneration.

 

THE SOURCE, SPLENDOUR, RESOURCE AND REALITY OF REDEMPTION

But who can invent that ?

The answer to that is simple. He is called God and His misrepresentations by man are legion and known as religion. The realities are also called religion, but they are as precise as science, as sure as mathematics, and surer, for even if our knowledge of reality, with which in fact we are very aware, were to fail, we are a product, not the criterion. Reality does not disappear because man deceives himself, comes or goes. We were not even around when it, the base and basics  (including us) were being made.

Required is payment and restoration, for the fall is not free fall! and in this case because of the nature of the human heart and the profundity of worship and self-deception, insight and deviousness, wanderings and woundings and mis-directive malignancies to which it is susceptible when not anchored in its God (Jeremiah 17:9-10), great is the cost. It involves: redemption and recreation. It is nothing superficial; indeed Jeremiah declares this (17:9). "The heart is deceitful above all things,  desperately wicked. Who can know it ?" The Lord then indicates that He  knows it, and tests it. It is good to know what you make, and the condition into which it may fall.

What then ? It is not the recreation which is like a nice little tour, that is the need; but that which endues entirely with purging, purification, remanufacturing and remodelling in a basis fitting for the purchase, and sound preparation for the LIFE ETERNAL. It is this which results when the abuse of spirit and will and mind and body is met with its payment and the resources of the Maker are moved into the new birth for those of mankind who so receive Him. It is like an explosion, an exposition and a composition, which the Creator, being creative, elects here to make (John 3:16, Titus 3).

Life together with the knowledge of God in whom its non-destruction beckons to the created spirit within us, is then in its blessed continuance. It is not a right; but the reality in redemption which not only covers the past, but enables the future. Love is like that. When it is the love of the  Creator, not the lunging of the desecrator, that is the gift: continuance in form apt for the event (cf. II Corinthians 4-5, I Corinthians 15, Isaiah 26:19) is a two part re-creation, first in spirit and then in body. That is the scope of operations with the Creator and man that He made.

The Creator's motive is not merely construction, productive, even when  the thinking product be feverish or guileful, abominable in resultant or insidious in self-glorification, this often as an extra, whether in people or in nations. In fact, His offer comes as beyond mere repair. 

It is not a matter of weary obligation or dutiful disdain: at the sublime level, who needs it! Disdain may indeed fit misdoings but not eternal life.

In the profundity of His mercies, He who made us, God has both stated and enacted; and He is found to be not only Creator but active in love. This is a revelation of the first order, known to millions, sounded for millenia, demonstrated in Jesus Christ and in the events of history which fulfil His word both of the future, and of His motives in so displaying the testable items in which His book abounds, given to us not only as a promise and premiss for our existence, but as testimony of mercy. Not cold charity or exploitation for tyranny, but the love that pays and the mercy that abounds, these are the divine criteria.

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Consider it. Who would want cold charity ? or dynamic dictatorial control by a selfish tyrant! Moreover, as we have seen, these are not of God.

But the need for the fathering by the Father of it all, the pastoral care by the constructor of it all, the understanding of that divine wonder worker behind it all, the tenderness of what is about new birth, this fits precisely with the God of all comfort, who knows not only how to deal with prolific pollution but woeful hearts. It is He who alone could do it.

It is He who

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in the Bible,

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in Jesus Christ,

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in prophecy,

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in observable entry into this world in person,

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in the preliminaries to it, as

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in the injunctions and predictions to make Him recognisable when He did it,

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in the prophecies made by Him when He came, and 

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in the working of this world to meet them, despite
a generic rebellion which now makes it all but ungovernable
and only one step from death:

has ACTED.

He has elected to announce and pronounce His solution,
both proclaimed and pronounced it; performed it; provided for its acceptance;
and given mankind time to go beyond natural time to eternal life, or to manifest another desire and follow it.

What then of the divine action ? In human form, He dies that we might live.

It is in general terms called salvation. In this case, it does as it must, involve repentance, for nothing is so bleak as the opportunist who would like God to arrive on the horizon to make things practically rather better, but not as God, just as an adjunct. He wants no God but rather godlets of choice, self-created, truncated in truth; and if they come, then this MUST be done or the sinner's whole purpose in living may be gone like yesterday. But if such truncation, such prescriptions for any god to be chosen, are followed, then there are results, when this is the face of man towards divine mercy.

No more can he hope to have a significant part in this universe's title deeds and grab the goodies at will.

However to grab the goodies that perish is scarcely an imperishable desire. The things of this world (more and more manifestly) pass away. Holding to them is mere blindness. They are environment, not gods.

True if you repent and receive the divine cheque of pardon and redemption (Matthew 20:28), you are no longer an autonomous unit; but really, being autonomous belongs to the One who actually is, so that  mere pretence to it being a woeful part of a wondrous creation gone tipsy, is a drunken procedure. You CAN choose it, but like stepping over a precipice, it is not an endearing thing, nor one which excites the joy of those who love you.

It is love which is a missing ingredient in all those who want to dismiss God, for their love is then without its source, like water passing through endless industrial areas in polluted streams, and it mixes with a cause-free universe and other delusions, which cannot but create self-contradictions and mesmerised collisions of thought, issuing in this or that particular confusion. This is often called a philosophy, a political schema, a  policy, but more properly it is a fantasy based on a phantasm, though the latter may be called nothing, when there is nothing else to think of in the Department of Self-Deception.

It may be unconscious. Man is especially capable in rationalising, more so than in rationality.

But it is there. In the Old Testament, the term idolatry was often employed, as a Get-God-Out-of-it mode. Such movements as this occurred (cf. Hosea 11, Isaiah 41,48, Malachi) in direct derogation of His mercy and truth.

It is in essence the same today. The name or furnishings of nomenclature  may change, but not the spirit of the thing, the result, the disrespect for morals and the high-dudgeon of self-affirmation, and the like. In Romans 1  you even find it traced, holding down the testimony of God like a wrestler, and going on into degrees of immorality including the sexual, as if a commentary from our own day. But God has known the declivity of old.

Indeed, God showed Himself not fond of the entire delusive dynamics and departure into feckless substitutes (destroying much of Israel, as much of this world, the one in invasions and the other in invasion in a watery rebuke. It is as in  II Peter 2-3, Genesis 6. Yet the redemption remains, unobliterated and consummated, for the cost having been paid (Titus 3:1-8, Romans 3:23ff. Hebrews 9-10), it is a free redemption, inapplicable unless taken (John 3:36).

But what does it mean ? It means resurrection, a marvellous perfection of the birth which as now is operative, but is to operate in consummation, as now in heart, so there in individual format. This time it is not in a mother-with-child conception, but a Creator with Redeemed exhibit, based on the Redeemer's resurrection which in turn was an unanswerable exhibit of the authenticity of His coming.

NOT ONLY could He

so heal myriads of people of any disease,

never thwarted in pronouncements which did not occur,
that is in failure of what He announced,
this being a perfection  fitting for the Creator come in flesh as man; and

heal OTHER  people to the point of overcoming actual death and raising them, even after days;

but

He could participate

in His own resurrection,

for the spirit of man is not the body, and the Spirit of God is beyond all creation,

and all of it is subject to Him, whether to bin or blessing.

Amid death-squadrons based on a different Christ (same name, Koran*2 - or other departures from Him, in other inadequately based options which use some of the Bible, but not all, something of Christ, but not all, some innovation, but not the original), and whatever else, there is no continuing peace. War is far easier, decapitation than thought, destruction than construction; for many would rather kill kids than dream of peace, whether in the name of Islam or anti-Zionism or both conjointly, or for other constructions, these being activated to destroy and not to build, making innovative doctrine whether drawn up many centuries ago, or spawned now, applied in not so different format, or spreading like zestful epidemics more recently. There are as Christ foretold, many false christs and false prophets (Matthew 24:24); it was to be and continually this is verified, year by year, in old flash-points or new flashinesses.

War in thought or army, in invasion or beheading, in scimitar or subjugation, in discriminatory taxation or again as in the Muslim case, in the Koran relating to a virtual cartoon of Christ as neither God nor Saviour nor Redeemer, nor Son of God, but more as a bathetic relic of invasion and reconstruction 600 years too late, proceeds at many levels. Its preludes perform, its ways rustle or tussle or thrust ruthlessly on.

As to the Koran cartoon of Christ, it is a creation of their own, and it is one which is not to be seen working. Unlike the actual Christ, its word is not law, its prediction is not fact. Hope is rightly conjoined to facts.  Faith is far more than facts, but not less. As to facts,  these God in all His words, whether from Christ or the prophecies that led to Him,  often testable, abounds.

There is hope in your future, God says in Jeremiah. It is so. They have stayed uniquely through endless seeming persecutions, prosecutions, invasions, evasions, deceits and devious plans of those who hate them, and returned, and stay put despite the multiplied murders of rocket launchings, even from land gratuitously given up, and even Russia's intervention in Syria, directly to its North, has not subjugated Israel. It fell because God disciplined it; and it returned, because God foretold it in His plans; and God said He would do both, and has done them. Efforts to invade are to come, and their rebuttal will be with the divine zeal that has carried out all the rest. That is but one episode, but one not hard to find against the mind of many nations, and though Israel is small like an island in a vengeful sea. See Ezekiel 34, 38-39, Micah 7, Luke 21:24, Matthew 24:1ff., and such sites as these listed*3.

He gives distinctive reason to believe Him. Faith refuses calamity that is needless, but comes to Him regardless of suffering. What stands, stands, and what falls, falls; and whichever way you go, it is faithfulness to God in His demonstrable word, which in faith counts. It is to this that man rightly bows. It is not to competitors who subjugate him but to Christ who liberates him. It is not to whatever else, or even partial immersion and submergence in many things, even in variable things which matters but emergence into the love of God through the portal of mercy and the reality of ransom, through faith, in love. .

Indeed one of the worst features of rebellion in general, is this lament among the dispossessed, the uprooted, like rolling brambles in a willy-willy. It is its hopelessness, the subjectivistic response to rejection of Redeemer. What is it like ? It is a like a child in a boat on the English channel, refusing the anti-nausea pill and shrieking dissatisfaction with his plight to daddy, while saying, YOU are no daddy! what are you doing to me!

It is not pretty. But salvation is beautiful....

You see it for example in Romans 10, John 10, Romans 3, Titus 3, John 3, Psalm 22, Luke 15, Matthew 20, Ephesians 1, I Thessalonians 1,5, Philippians 3, almost everywhere in the Bible in its basis, need, means, results and underlying love. We, as a creation, NEED love and when various hatreds are tried as a substitute, they not only do not work, but cannot.

It is not a supposition that is needed, to cover this alienation; but the Saviour Himself.

 

NOTES

*1

A recent work on this topic is Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome, from Emeritus Professor J.C. Sanford, is one which in principle illustrates the indeflectible presence in the material creation, of the second law of thermodynamics. Genes are no exception; to them is allotted no exemption.

Man as man, an inheritance on this earth, is not in himself invulnerable, however much he both pines and longs for it. The Creator's method of limiting the enterprise, and enabling its extension is as given, whether when He spoke it into the linguistic format of such items as DNA, or in the Bible, that self-demonstrating book,  culminating the the coming of the Redeemer Jesus Christ. Folly has its place in testing; but it is not forever, for God is wise, and His wisdom has the only other option to that ludicrous nothing: eternity.

*2

See More Marvels from the Majesty and the Mind of the Almighty,
Ch. 4.

 

*3

See on Israel sites such as:

World Amiss ... Chs. 8,  911,  14, Department of Bible ... Vol.11, Ch. 16, Mercy Outdistances ... Ch. 9. See also Israel Tetrad (now a pentad).