CHAPTER 7

 

THE  FASHION OF DIVINE  PASSION

Shown at the  First, Consummated  to the Last

EZEKIEL 18:19-31 and 33:1-11

 

JUSTICE DOES NOT EVACUATE FROM TRUTH
NOR MERCY FROM MAN, WHEN HE IS PREPARED  TO RECEIVE IT

It is  good to get back to the thrust, glorious like a sunset, one  that  lingers and continues as if its gloaming never ceased its final  roamings over this and that valley or patch of sky-works, to enlighten and give colour, of the impassioned love, the relentless surge of it from the Lord, culminating in Calvary and the resurrection even of the body of Christ, the fundamentals of the faith,  and the peaks of the works of God.

Consider these two passages in  Ezekiel, then,

 I THE CONTROVERSY

There was a strange controversy between God and many in  Israel. Oddly, they seemed to feel that there was too much mercy. GOD for His part, was prepared to pardon the sinner when he turned back in repentance and faith, to do otherwise; but man felt this unfair. Moreover, God would not endorse punishing the son for the father, or the father for the son. The soul that sins shall die: unless mercy is sought  and obtained where it MAY be  found (Isaiah 55). Instead of strutting hard-nosed moral superiority, they were faced with universal guilt. God then taught.

The divine message, at this point, is clear: There is a gap of grace. The term transliterated agape in New Testament relates  vitally. God  WILL NOT EXACT the past of the returning sinner, but pardons; and He will not exact on one family  member because of another. Man is made in the divine image,  and each is to be so treated. Not  fair! said the controversialists in Israel. Why not ? Can God not do with His own what He will ? Moreover WHAT is He doing but pardoning, so that He is not trying to exact,  like a flinty usurer, what He can get, but is interested in gaining the soul and  spirit in loving obedience and wise living, where He may  without violence, achieve this. It is a matter of a better perspective for a better result than mere judicial  penny-pinching. Far more, life itself is the exaction that  COULD be made of one  as of all, if you are going to despise divine grace: the soul  that  sins shall die (Ezekiel 18:20).

Having  made such things clear, God shows them a deeper heart, a more profound love, a mercy that delights to  operate (as in  Micah 7:19-20). one that both would cast all their sins into the sea, and subdues their iniquities, casting aside payments, swallowing up errors and strengthening with self-discipline and desire, so that man may serve Him in fruitfulness of function and peace of heart. It is God in person (Micah 5:1-3), who to  pardon in purity, strikes through sin in Himself!

 

  EZEKIEL 18:30-32

2  THE RECOMMENDED REALISM

There is then  a series of prescriptions  for pardon and peace.

THE CALL TO REPENT

TURNING FROM  TRANSGRESSIONS - ALL OF THEM

SO AVOIDING INIQUITY AS RUIN

CAST AWAY THE BREACHES

GET A NEW HEART AND SPIRIT

DO NOT DIE, WHAT'S IN IT!

GOD IS NOT HE WHO DESIRES THIS TRAGIC LOSS.

What did God Himself both program and perform in the thrust of this love ? Indeed you find in this with Jeremiah 33:11 a overpowering wonderful expression of His love and pity, determination and resolution that man  might not destroy himself.

You could describe it in many ways, but here is one. It is like a Symphony in P and God. Survey 18:30ff., and 33:11.

You find FIRST:

bullet

the passion for mercy
 

bullet

the precision of judgment, the profundity of kindness

bullet

the purity of love

bullet

the perfection of self control, that does not
seize, shanghai or force, but would rather
lose some and lament for the self-excluded, foreknown in heart before all time. 

You find SECONDLY:

bullet

a gap, where God Himself covers the sin He mercifully chooses to disregard
on repentance and faith,
 

bullet

the  agape which desires such liberty and licence, such dismissal of debt,
 

bullet

and the grace which urges and surges into such sovereign splendour,
the heart of the King.

As to what God did, you find back in the day of those prophets, points aplenty, and even also before Ezekiel's day and Jeremiah's, long before it.

Thus Jeremiah in  31:31, dealing with the virgin birth (a woman in an  entire novelty encompassing a child with divine intent relating  to pardon - 31:20-22), deals also with the New Covenant. In Ezekiel  16:60, it is called  the everlasting covenant; and likewise the prophet indicates in 16:19-21, that the revelation of God is to come to the Gentiles, who will cast  away their pallid substitutes for truth, their vacuities, emptinesses, seeing them at that time,  as lies. Indeed, Isaiah in 45 appeals to the "ends of the earth" to look to the Lord and be saved, just as Chs. 49-55 tell of the basis of the new and everlasting covenant. The  justice, judgment of the Lord  in His equity, is  for one  and for all. Essentialised in Christ, it is fallen on Him for those who seek His  cover (Isaiah 53:4-6). This divine moral grandeur, this pardon,   does not grow old, even though the theocratic State of Israel for an Age would cease to be its mode of exposition (Isaiah 65:13-15,62:6,11).

That State had its own place in His plan (Isaiah 42,49), the blind to be brought back to their land, the very opposite of the spiritual, this returning  contingent (42:10-19) being those who had been  near and were now far  from  the  Lord, those the Lord's servants specialising in blindness! God is deep as Paul points out in  Romans 11, and has many plans; but only one Gospel. His witness is in all things, both small and great; but His focus is on salvation.

The place of grace and equity, pardon and peace, it is in the Gospel for Jew and Gentile  alike,  so let us learn from Ezekiel 18. Bear your  own sins, do not seek to  export. Find your own regeneration from the regal pardoning power of Christ. Do not try to have it by proxy. Repent in your own heart, do not participate in a group mood instead. 

 

EZEKIEL 33:1-11

3  THE PASSIONATE PRONOUNCEMENT

So great is the glory of divine grace, that failure to heed it is a prodigy of pity, so that even Christ wept over Jerusalem, mourning that it had not heeded. But He came.

Many do NOT come WITH the Gospel He came to pay for and proclaim. There are responsibilities,  the outthrust of divine love. Ezekiel was appointed a warner, a watchman by the Lord (Ezekiel 33:7). The terms of reference are clear for such. IF you warn and they do not heed, as was the case of the Jerusalem of Christ's day, then their folly is on thier onw heads, and you are clear.  If however you do not warn, and the battle comes, the blight and the horror of it, then its  blood is on you. But what a message you have, what a bounty of divine pity goes with the pleas, what a glory of persevering love is illustrated in God's pursuit of a lapsed people, what grief when they did not take the wonderfully free offer of His consummate action on the Cross (II  Corinthians 5:17-20).

Who correspond most clearly to these watchmen today ? In Acts 20 you find Paul, having called for the Ephesians elders, telling them of  his own faithful zeal in warning,  teaching, reaching, continuing with them, providing the whole counsel of God, and  applying this to themselves. He tells them as overseers of the flock,  that they must guard, for not only a  wolves to come, dripping with their well-known fangs and furies, flurries and  importunities, but these  spiritual wolves will be savage, ravening with their special emphasis! Thus the elders, as overseers, have authority, and women being denied this, they cannot be elders (Assault on Timothy). But that is far from imagining they may not be counsellors, and warn. Indeed, the fact that the elders were so charged does not mean that others may not warn; it is just that these warned AS overseers,  a specific task. People are  appointed diversely, but needs must be met broadly.

Who may NOT  warn when a wolf launches an  attack! In the case of Numbers 11:23-30, 70  elders were appointed, to help Moses, but two people,  Medad and  Eldad, also prophesied, and one  reported it with concern to Moses. His reply ? I wish ALL the Lord's people were prophets, and that He would put His Spirit on them! This was his vigorous response! In fact, Hebrews 3:13 tells us to exhort one another daily, in view of the vital importance of the Gospel of grace and its place in life. Its place ? How, it asks, shall we escape if we neglect such great salvation! (Hebrews 2:1ff.)! And so we move to the grand loveliness of Ezekiel 33:11.

Here the prelude to the announcement is the need to be faithful in warning,  and it deals with watchmen. If you speak and they  do not hear, you are clear. But SPEAK! Do other souls not matter to you ? They matter to God. How much do they matter to Him ?

In 33:11, we find these components, in theme as in 18, but in this place with individuality.

THE DIVINE DECLARATION IS AS  DEEP AS HIS VERY LIFE.

NO KINK CALLS FOR DIVINE PLEASURE IN DEATH, HOWEVER WICKED THE ONE.

THE DESIRE IS TO REPEL IT AND TURNING TO THE CREATOR, TO LIVE.

THE CALL IS REPETITIVE, EXTREME IN PATHOS, DEEP IN INTENSITY,

'TURN', FOR WHY PUT IN A TENDER FOR DEATH!

Professor John  Murray pointed to excellent features in this verse: they were such as these - the asseveration, the affirmation, the negation, the exhortation and the interrogation. That at least was the thrust of it. Yet for  all the wonder of this, there is more, for vast are the implications, and just as the tenor is sovereign, so it is entirely solicitous. God desires as He will, appoints as He will, and loves without limit, as His yearning loses nothing.

On this occasion, passion  and  depth conspire to produce an infinitely clear depiction of divine love. There is nothing hidden; there are no mysteries. God is open. With ALL His being to the life itself, He has one desire for man, even for the expressly wicked. It is that they live, that they do not suffer ruin, and He calls repeatedly as in  Matthew 23:37, with an insistence unmistakable (cf. SMR Appendix B), to one  as to  all. There are no aristocratic chambers: God wants ALL as in John 3,  where His mission in Christ was NOT  condemnation but salvation, the world into which He came (which is one) being the  object likewise of His desire, and that, for its salvation. Whoever you are and wherever you are fallen, this is His desire, unmistakable, unshakeable, implacable, otherwise specifiable only by the most  profound contradiction! If you hear  it, respond.  If you want it,  come and get it.

Let no theological anodyne or addition confound you. Consider the depth of the divine passion, and its breadth, its startling comprehensibility and its sovereign splendour, mistaking none and nothing, sending the one Gospel of divine selection, to the people of this world, that  He might reconcile ALL things (Col. 1:19ff.), yes even in heaven as on earth.

When you go with the word of God in your heart, as for example did the famed Small Woman to China, you find those appointed to you and to Him, and your going has its result; or if as in Ezekiel, you are appointed to  a rebellious house who will not hear you, yet in his case the testimony they rejected, many since then have accepted, and in his prophecy are passages as here,  of such grandeur of love and passion, compassion and thrust that it enlivens the heart and many have been found for millenia in this. Francis Schaeffer even used part of this prophecy for the very title of one of his books.

The Lord grants the grace of repentance according to His own mind (Acts 11:18), just as He appoints  salvation according to His own Gospel, sovereignly selecting it according to His own mind and heart, not waiting but knowing,  just as love  so pure as His comes from the very Being who He most blessedly is. Past the torment and treachery of many human bastions and braggarts, ideological distortions and contortions,  lies and deceits,  false prophecies and fatuous philosophies, there is a fidelity so grand that God has even found those whom  love discovers, unveils, displays on the screen of His desire, as before  all works, and  apart from any works save His own, He knew the very beings of those  yet to be created. THAT is His foreknowing before the going, the security before history happens, and the assurance that no technical problem will distort, disturb or spoil what He has found. This He WILL find with that passion which even descended into hell*1 in His circuit of wonder.

This is the testimony of truth, the assurance of grace, a divine way to accomplish ALL His desire, losing nothing, in the splendour of His seeking for all, stopping short of take-over, as by imperious grabbing,  with all the restraint of love.

Thus not only is the result assured by foreknowledge, but the means are foreknown, and whether it be a case of sending on the Calvinist  schema, where the love of God to the lost is truncated into 'horrible decree'  of sad misconstruction by that theologian*2, or on biblical lines, where that  love COULD not be more extensive, in either case, the one who is sent to preach and teach in Christ's name has no knowledge of who is to be saved, but the going will bring, unless it be intended purely as a warning ministry for those to be lost (the tenor of Ezekiel  2:1-6 with 3:1-6), just those souls whom the Lord, knowing in His love in advance who are His,   has appointed for redemption.

Those not found are not forced, and when their day comes,  as they have differentially not responded before the eye of eternity, so they go where their preference has divinely been known ultimately to go (John 3:19, I Peter 2:8-10). Thus in the light of the love of God for the world and His desire that  all things in heaven and on earth be  reconciled to Himself (Col. 1),  there are  two outcomes. One is that a person believes in Him, and  so has eternal life. The other is the preference for darkness in the face of this light (John 3:19, cf. John 15:22ff.). In this case, there is condemnation, for not only has sin soiled but preference has rejected washing.

The stated  ground of this resultant, is that preference in that context of light. It is in categorical contrast with the stated desire of the  Lord, being the alternative outcome, the ruin from which He urged escape; and what is made eminently clear is this: it is NOT GOD on who acts to depart from the criterion of judgment, but man on whom this in His knowledge, rests in its selective impact.  The deity does not depart from it, evade it,  avoid it.

As it is,  so He acts, having  sought to remove it by ultimate sacrifice, and removing it for many. It is MAN in His image, defiled and so  divinely both known and foreknown, on whole all negation rests. The outcome binds, but the input precedes logically. The criteria show it; the Lord knows it; and the works of light, thus not desired, beyond the  flesh and in the certainties of divine knowledge, differentially consign to condemnation,  alas most grievous (John 3:36). Man however was not made in the image of God for nothing; nor is he turned into a machined object or mutated manipulee in order to be gained. GOD KNOWS, and so acts. The truth is the criterion: love provides the escape freely, truth knows the resultants.

The going of the missionary will make precisely the different appointed, in either case, that of the appalling concept of the horrible decree Calvin invents, or in the glorious majesty of truth, which explicitly and repeatedly and both in principle and practice seeks the whole world into which Christ came, the ALL THINGS of Colossians 1, in terms of the very blood of Christ by which He has made  peace, surging to  all, reaching some. It is in some  ways rather like static: the message comes but interference distorts. He would have all, EVEN to the depth of the blood of the sacrificial funding of Christ: that is what He tells us in Colossians in John 3,  for example. Yet the divinely discerned differential in preference that no time can prevent, nor anyone distort, past all works and all the power of man to manipulate, in truth as it actually is, is foreknown to Him: the essence divined and the certainty brought out to His light. That is the emphatic biblical message. Where God has plainness, Calvin has mystery and even a horrible decree, whereas in fact, what we have is the outcome of a wonderful love, past all inhibitions of debased human will in the flesh; and where it is foreknown to be balked, yet it remains pure, and does not distort.

Consider the missionary venture. Who knows when a word from the Gospel will unchain a soul ? when one is to be won ? Whether in the 'horrible decree'  of Calvin, the matter be visualised as if God were unknown as to love's nature and scope, or in the biblical profession, it is in this all one in this, whichever model be followed. If you do not go, you fail in love: this too is the same. If you DO go, then souls otherwise ready to be lost, and currently in that state, may be found,  who without your going would have been lost. That does not however mean that their destiny depended on your nearness to obedience, but that God has you scheduled to  do it and foreknew that you would;  and in his plan that is the only way it is going to be done, so that without it, it would not be done.

IF that were so, and you slackly refused to go on mission, then in His love, which does not blight mercy's approach to one because of the sin of another, He would have had a way to perform the same result, negative or positive as was in His foreknowledge. Yet it remains true, your going makes the difference. That is how He  who knows all, has it worked out.

Worlds do not turn on you if a missionary, though guilt or responsibility does, in the eternal  consequences of the divine love of stated depth and dimension; but rather is it that eternal things are wrought through you. People are not extinguished because you sin: God told Jonah He was not keen to obliterate Nineveh: because they had received an ultimatum did not make them consignable without hope. He is always looking for a way to deliver, since He has no pleasure in the death of the wicked but that he should TURN... TURN! He declares so very clearly.

Worlds however may indeed turn with you,  as you fulfil your given charter, instead of bringing a divinely perceived need to have a more reliable method. While this reduces the paramountcy of man, it only stresses that of God, which is how it should be. From Him, to Him and for  Him are all things (Romans 11:36).

The main grave difference in the  schema of sending out messengers or missionaries and finding is one, that in the Calvinist case, the horrible decree is mixed  with his concern, for on that basis it is not known why there is this gap, this negative in the sovereign desire; whereas biblically there is NO SUCH GAP. There is no mystery in love, its extent,  calibre, quality being unsurpassable, magnificent, brilliant, effectual and both unduped and unbaulked. Love stops where it would become something else, if it went further! It is satisfied with that, though it long lament. To be sure the Calvinist might contend that he trusts that the reason for exclusion is a good one, a good pleasure, but if the theologian be followed, the biblical coverage and extremity of this divine interest in love, is cut short, mystery where the mountain lay, and if he be followed yet further, a sense of horror inhabits that mystery.

Alas, that  the direct, divinely stated thrust of John 3,  apart from  all else, is not faced. One world, one God, one Gospel, one Christ, one desire for the world into which He comes to be saved, one desire that it be not condemned, one provision for escape from this, one balking agency, the divine knowledge in truth that some differentially prefer darkness (John 3:19). This is in contrast to the divine urgency, being both categorical and conclusive. Moreover it is stated definitively.

THIS is the one condemnation of this one group, known by the One before time churned or light was thrust aside.

In biblical fact, love states its nature and where it will stop. In the one case there is the sheer delight of the sovereign will  of God finding all to be found, without failure, for this phase, and at the end of  all phases, which is as far as the limitless love of God to the lost will go. This it does without becoming impure  in its use of means, all so appointed  being found (cf. Revelation 5:9-11).   Nothing contrary to love seduces the matter*3; for it does not distort itself in its purity, in order to secure a false end of the issue, as if the soul were re-made in ORDER to be saveable, instead of  remade because saveable and so foreknown not in works, but in essence.

What splendour of  sovereign majesty and glory of heart, grandeur of grace is shown when one moves as in the tender dawn to those without Christ, that the word of God might find and nestle in the heart of ALL of His people, all His works declaring Him until all being found, it culminates in the consummation of that free love which is that of the heart of this, our Sovereign Lord and kindly King.

Of this, the afterglow is to all eternity (Revelation 5:13).

 

NOTES

*1

In Chapter 3 above, this point is dealt with, as shown below. See also

Aspects of the Glory of the God of all Grace Ch. 5, and

The Kingdom of Heaven Ch. 4.

 

But God deals with eternity as lost man with time; and He knows where each person is and will be, from eternity. Even when man forgets himself, from the heights He clutches His own (49:15), drawn  and delivered from above (Psalm 18:16, 144:7). To the depths He has gone to find and  to feature (I Peter 3:18-22), His triumphal journey  to the cross not stopping at the world then current, but exposing salvation's wonder to and for all time:  even to the nub of former judgment. the flood of devastation, He proceeds. Made alive in the Spirit, that is realm to which  He went as the Apostle's Creed rightly declares.

It is not a flit back you find in I Peter 3:19,22, but a progression forwards, with Christ featured inveterate in His saving thrust, moved indeed in the immensity and intensity of His commission, and indeed, He has gone on  to heaven following His circuit (I Peter 3:22), where all is subject  to Him. 'Spirits in prison' is not the biblical designation for those now living: prisoners indeed, but not spirits in prison. This is the language of Jude for the lost. Such then was the inventory of His passion and compassion, that as He has foreknown, so He has proceeded to preach (I Peter 3:19).

 

*2

 

On this, see:

The Glow of Predestinative Power Ch. 4,

The Lord of Longsuffering ... Ch.    6

Celestial Harmony for the Terrestrial Host Ch. 2.

The Christian Pilgrimage Ch.    3.

More broadly, see:

Great Execrations, Great Enervations, Greater Grace Chs.   7 and    9,
A Time to Praise God
, Appendix 1,
with
Message
... Ch. 9,

Marvels of Predestination
... Ch. 4, Ch. 6, Supplement 6,

The Spiritual Sagacity of Predestination in Love Ch. 4,

The Pride of Life
... Ch. 7,

Dizzy Dashes, Heady Clashes and the Brilliant Harmony of Inevitable Truth
Ch. 6, esp. *3

Massifs of Pure Splendour
Ch. 7

A further Useful Grouping that may be  taken separately,   on Love, Predestination, the Bible and the Beliefs from the Word of God to the Mind of Faith ...

The Glow of Predestinative Power ... Chs.  4,   5The Christian Pilgrimage Ch.   3,

Christ's Ineffable Peace ... Ch.    2  (extensive),   3, 

Massifs of Pure Splendour Ch.   7, Jesus Christ Defaced ... Ch.    2;

Gratitude for His Glorious  Grace Ch.    2 

Outrageous Outages ... and the Courage of Christ Ch.    9;

The Majestic Might of the Merciful Messiah Ch.    5 (the extensive attestations in the Bible, of the love of God for the lost, without attenuation of heart), with

Anguish, Ecstasy and the Mastery of the Messiah,
Chs.   8,   9);

Great Execrations ... Greater Grace Chs.    7,  9.

 

*3

Browning expresses this facet of love poignantly in his poem on SAUL. Here you see the loving heart of David, used to harping, not in distasteful words but with literal harp and song, to soothe the tormented spirit of poor King Saul. Though still young, the young shepherd lad senses the misfit in the spirit of Saul, with life, and wishes he could grant him what is needed,  something new, indeed even a new life, so that he might recover from his melancholy mood, so gravely near to inconsolable depression.

He says:

I yearned - 'Could I help thee, my father, inventing a bless,
I would add  to that life of the Past, both the Future and this;
I would give thee new life altogether, as good, ages hence,

As this moment, - had love but the warrant, love's heart to dispense!'

 

It does not say, "to dispense with love's heart", as if to  do without it, which would contradict the flow and mood of the moment, the intense desire of young David to help Saul,  as well as add "with" to form an idiom not used here by Browning. It DOES say, "had love but the warrant, love's heart to dispense." That means that love needs a warrant in order to give out and yield and enact what it would really want, and  want to give,  like a dispenser of anything. It cannot, without being love no more, just act out its desire,  however, and invade,  seize, grasp the mind and soul of its object, the one loved,  as if its  very nature as love grew wanton, and love mere command.

What is that necessary warrant, that David requires for  love to act out  its  desire  ? It is outside the domain of love to inveigle, intrigue superficially, manipulate, shanghai or force. That is another affair entirely. The nature of love involves a certain reciprocity if action is to be. It is seen whether in the love of parents or suitors. Even  a good desire to reconstruct and renew is not to be effected in an unwilling object of that love. Consent is necessary, as implied when Christ said in HIS love,  "How often would I ... but you would not," (Matthew 23:37), and again, "If you had known, especially you, even  in this your day, the things that make for your peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes," (Luke  19:42ff.).

What HE would like to be, is found NOT to be that which the object of His love is willing to have.  It WILL not  consent to, have, accept,  respond to the ardour of the love, or its desire; and this exhibits a terrible poignancy when the love is that of God! This is found constantly in the Old Testament in the grieving,  relieving, appealing, hortatory, pleading, enablings, that yet stop short of personality change, though it is offered, or making what is loved to be such that now it responds, without regard to the will, since this is then simply bypassed.

It is NOT bypassed. That is the continual exhibition of such words as those of the progressive Psalms, showing both the mercies and desires of God and repetitive refusals, contrary to His heartfelt wishes, as in Isaiah 63-64, Psalm 106, Ezekiel 20. To be sure, He is sovereign, but not the swaggering or corruptive kind, but rather unique in the purity of His heart. He would rather endure the cross that stoop to that; and He did. He would rather do  all necessary that justice being sated, mercy might sound freely, that thirst be quenched, and yet not use a pump to insert the water, or a revitaliser, to remake the heart so that heart by passed, a new heart arises which though not that of the one loved, will  at least love as desired! That is not loving someone; it is substituting what one desires for a site, so that a differint being loves, and the fraud is apparent, mere self-deception, and pitiful at that.

Certainly God,  from His word, the Bible,  refuses to leave the final result to the mere conundrum of unconverted spirit and heart; He has,  as befits such majesty, bypassed mere circumstance  and found the essence, the vital reality of each soul; and from even HIS omniscience, He has foreknown who receives and who does not, His desire. Romans 9 tells us it has nothing to do with future works, but is the personal prerogative of God to KNOW in fact (for God doe snot 'know' what is not so).  He knows, for man as made in God's own image, with scope for disposition,  before all sin or  fall or history of the creation,  who is His; and this He  ensures will happen.

That is to ensure this much evidenced and highly prized liberty for man; not to deny it (cf. Ephesians 1:4ff., Romans 8:29ff.). In view of this, none CAN come in the field of history unless the Father draw that person (John 6:65) and so grant. There is no POSSIBILITY therefore of error, and  no unfortunate calamity, when someone who MIGHT or would have found God if given the technical aspects of a history made different,  does not because of something getting in the way, ruining the reality of eternal preference. In John 3:19, we learn that accordingly, just a God would have liked to save the world, not judge it,  so those  despite this universal love of God, in its primary and inward function, who have a darkness  preference, will be judged by that very thing! The ELEMENTAL does God know; and this He sustains against all tide and circumstance, all corruption and all devices of the devil. The Lord KNOWS who are His (I Timothy 2:19), and secures them.

If love had only the warrant to seize, then BECAUSE God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, therefore the world would  all be saved. But love is not so,  and the Bible shows in drama, narrative, exhibition of the heart of the Lord directly  as in Ezekiel 33:11, Jeremiah 48, the latter even of Moab, and indirectly,  as in Proverbs 1, the insatiable ardour of His love together with the inveterate realism in the face of what is shown and known to be a contrary preference, even in reality, beyond all time, before creation, and known by God  assuredly.

God, like Christ in the temptation (Matthew 4) would rather lose the world than force it, manipulate it, take it without consent. For NOTHING would He alter in this, and He would not be bought even for EVERYTHING this world has. The integrity of love is crucial  and since God IS love (I John 4:7ff.), so that nothing to the contrary dominates Him, it also means that the realities of love prevent the sort of superficiality which socialism so readily dispenses, and the sort of sovereignty it equally so readily begins to  seize, over the very lives of the peoples.  Thus peoples  will (in the purer cases) become the dictation to others, and man-made ideas turn from lore to law as in Australia at the present, currently threatened with making biblically defined sexual perversity sacrosanct by authorising law, and so dictating to those who no more accept it than using a shoe horn for a tooth-pick.

That is, in biblical language, it is an abomination, that does not fit the design,  and is unnatural (Romans 1:17ff.). Like adultery, it led to death in the Old Testament, and leads to exclusion from the kingdom of heaven, unless repented of, in the light of the Gospel.

Weakness is one thing, and  sin may be forgiven; but wantonry and living such ways in principle is rebellion, worse than witchcraft, in the Bible's exposure of the reality of it all, as the word of the living God (I Samuel 15:23).

But what of those who invent priorities and morals and socially man-handle reality to desire, and so rule their fellows ? On that basis, people become God, as in the idea of reasonable people or those of reasonable disposition or attitude or approach DETERMINING whether something is acceptable or not, in society, as ultimate arbiters,while fines or worse await the non-conformist. That has very much in common with some of the worst phases of the Church of England in  former times, when acting as  State Church, it turned morals to theocratic law, without actually being a nation governed by the Bible.

This current autocracy, as is  emerging in Australia, however is far worse; for in those former times, there was  at least some relationship to the God who in making man,  made him in this way and not that, and for this purpose and not that,  so that right and wrong became intrinsic to the case. Such religious dictation as is looming on the political horizon here, is of course contrary to the Australian Constitution, for it is assuredly tantamount to the institution by the Commonwealth of a religion, or answer to ultimate question of  right and wrong, basis and actuality, valuation and priority, articulated perspective to the uttermost height of all  phases of practical  living.

What then would be the mouthpiece  which so speaks to the nation ? it is nothing other than some of its people, whether majority or not, commandeering the lives of all of its peoples, or attacking them. It  is wonderful that the Constitution of this land guarded against such terrorising tyranny as that would be. It is hoped it will be respected, or Australia will quickly realise the constitutional freedom based on reverence to God  Almighty in the setting of our creation as a Commonwealth, was indeed worth fighting to protect. It is easy to discard, if truth falls first (as in Isaiah 59).

God  loves. It is nothing like that. David in Browning's poem was well aware that even the most ardent desire for good for a person, even to make-over the whole life in order to avoid foreseeable grief, did not constitute a mandate to do this. While this is a literary composition, a poem of Robert Browning, it is entirely in this in accord with the testimony of the Bible, which is not surprising in this instance, or that of personal  love as distinct from lust, which agrees with both.

Mercifully, this sensitive perspective found constantly in the Bible, was that shown in the Declaratory Statement of the Presbyterian Church of Australia, founded in 1901, as part of its outstanding CONSTITUTION. Unhappily  in 1991, in effect,  it nullified this aspect, and became what  appears to be simply a confessionalistic church, no more bound simply and utterly to biblical statements ONLY, as criterion in  all doctrine.

Extreme -isms on both sides tend to obscure the beauty of biblical truth; but digging into the word of God shows the resolution of all mysteries for logic, and the wholesomeness of refusal to depart from what is written, for the sake of any theory. Textual fidelity is an inalienable privilege of any Presbyterian Church, though many seem now to short-circuit it in favour of mere theoretical preferences, a problem starkly revealed since Christ's declaration of Mark 7:7ff..

 

See on these features such sites as: SMR Appendix B, Possess Your Possessions Volume 10, Chapter 6, *10,
with The Biblical Workman Ch. 8 and Prospect, Retrospect  and Reality Ch, 3 Epilogue, *3.

See on  resolutions more generally,  for example, SMR Chs, 3, 5, 10, and

LIGHT DWELLS WITH THE LORD'S CHRIST

WHO ANSWERS RIDDLES

AND WHERE HE IS, DARKNESS DEPARTS

Bible or Blight, Christ or Confusion:
The Comprehensive Resolution of Man's Intractable Problems
is Found Only in the Bible, the Word of God.