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CHRIST JESUS : THE WISDOM, AND THE POWER OF GOD
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Rev. Dr. Robert E. Donaldson

Published by
World Wide Web Witness Inc.

 

ISBN  09581449-3-1

 

©
 
 
 

PREFACE

Please read this as it is an integral part of the volume itself!

The important thing of course is to find, to know and to walk with God. If that were not possible, the important thing would be to find the truth; but since that is impossible without God, there is no other important thing. Without God, there IS no absolute standard, and all is relegated to an unknowable fudge, with rules of working, but no assignable meaning, purpose or point. If that were so, it COULD not be known; for if there were no God, that self-declaring actuality, this being the discoverable truth, and truth being evacuated without source, it would be mere self-contradiction to make such a negative affirmation in the first place.

Man's mind is mere calamity of word and desire without God, and man without God is no different. He wanders with deeds as witless as mis-taught minds, ludicrous but for the tragedy, often surging and childish in the extreme, except for the sophistication of device, tangled except for the visible constructions. Almost daily they blow each other up in the Arab invasion of Israel, the Moslem proxy war going on from many sources via the Palestinians, that ultimate of the phoney, that mismatched, cross-hatched scramble of symbols and blood, teeming as if it were mistaken for water. And that ? It is merely in this setting, a prime example. Others seem to want to follow it with ardent zeal, thundering, threatening, harrying and violating anything human as in the Sudan, where the colossal magnitude of Moslems trying to make CAPTIVES and serfs of Christian children cries to heaven for results. They DO come, but not before the face of the foe is exposed (cf. Genesis 15:15-16, Acts 17:24-26). Of this, we shall consider further, DV, in News in Ch. 1 to follow.

Wisdom is afar off. The Creator is conveniently forgotten in endless ludicrous substitutes for thought

(cf. Spiritual Refreshings 4, 13,
Ancient Words, Modern Deeds Chs. 9, 13,
Little Things Ch. 5,
Wake Up World! ... Chs. 4-6, and Epilogue,
TMR Chs. 1, 5, 7, 8,
Stepping Out for Christ ... Chs. 2, 7-10 ),

which affect man's mind, as a wealthy upbringing may turn the mind of an airy youth. Excluded in logic, they nevertheless explore the possibilities, as if a mouse were to examine endless traps, to find which was ineffectual. They all work and he is always caught, but endless in the miasma of his mistaken theses, the alogisms of his tireless tedium of misplaced ideation - you can scarcely call it 'thought', for it is wrought in vanity, pursued in the face of fact, and executed in the relish of unreality.

Man refuses to know God. Hence the wisdom of God is missing from the globe; it is NOT that it is the mad-house for Mars, though at the international level at least, there is some excuse for the roguish concept of Shaw. In fact, millions are deemed mentally unsound even in the USA, and the world-wide difference is possibly in the main, the smaller number of psychiatrists to give the verdict. And that verdict ? See SMR Ch. 4 for a review of the assessment of man by man without God (which it usually is), and the validity of truthless bases in estimating the truth about man!

If wisdom is lost, so too is power. The power of God is a beautiful thing. A small child relishes the father's power to know, to do, to achieve, to perform; and it is fine because daddy is fine. God is wonderful, so that His power is delightful. The power which HAS to be behind all manifestations of its performance (there is nothing to manifest when nothing is there, and when something is manifested something is there to be made manifest), whether in the force of gravity, or the securing of the ceaseless seeming motion within the atoms, in the maintenance of form, the preservation of kinds in life, the inscription of orders for its manufacture over and over again, the zestful thrust of thought, the surveying responsibilities of spirit in man: this does not fail. It all requires power and it is all given it, has been given it.

In a great house, you may have multitudes of devices from computers to vacuum cleaners, from reticulated air-conditioned (reverse cycle to boot), and structural solidity; but it all requires power of one sort or another, power to achieve and power to resist, to be what the thing is in the midst of what is potentially more or less powerful to the CONTRARY. So in the universe is power, and it requires like all power, its source. The source in this case must be sufficient to course into each channel, in the past, in the present, in continuity, in diversification, in correlation, in synthesis of mind, matter and spirit in that delightful little package called man (delightful from an engineering and cogitative point of view, but amazing in liberty of thought and action, despite all the jaded cries of the cynics); and its sufficiency for all of this is found only in God as we have seen often enough (cf. SMR, TMR).
 

 

Some seem mesmerised by the material with its extreme and extraordinary seeming limits; some by the mental, with its wonderful facilities of correlating event and idea, ideology and practice; and some by the spiritual, with its zoom-in lens on the structure of ideology, the ferment of desire, the realisation of truth and the splendour of man's inheritance from the Lord. In all these cases, the avenue to God Himself is lost in furious pre-occupation or spurious religion. it is necessary to go to God Himself. Necessary ? It is needful if you want to know what you are for! What is permanently misplaced is often known as garbage (cf. Mark 9:45 where 'Gehenna' the smouldering dump is the term used, as in Matthew 5:29-30).

This avenue to God, carefully constructed by Himself: It is not tree-lined, though it is Cross-governed. How is this so ? In this, it is so, that without the Cross man would have been a useless creation, best consigned to the dust-bin (of thought) before his creation. A mismatch of fraud and ambition, selfishness and sectional interests, proud ideologies and surging violence, gentleness and sweetness, unselfishness and cardinal sacrifice, patience and impenitence, resignation and endless feuding, his sickness speaks like a loudspeaker on a sports afternoon for some large school. Where gross immorality lapses, pride often enters; where serviceability is found, also befriending it how often is self-acclaim, that humble self-assurance based on the acclaim of merit, inwardly disposed! And what IS this merit ? was the desire invented ? or is God given the glory.

And if He IS given the glory, in what is a glory which consists in alienation, ignorance or dismissal ? If later is soon enough to 'meet one's Maker', is life then not a trial, a test and a discovery ? And what is this discovery, which refuses to discover till the test is past.

What is it like ? It is like a footballer of talent, who does not discover this power because he is waiting to find after death on this earth, what the actual facts were, and disdains putting things to the open test of reality. To find the wisdom of God, it is necessary to find God, and without Him, there is divorce already.

The wisdom of the Creator, so vastly magnified in the very interstices both of matter and mind and spirit, is however not astray. It knows no limit and finds no rebuff. Instead of worshipping this One with such wisdom and power, over all systems and their cause, and FINDING His wisdom and EXPERIENCING His power,  man naturally tends to seek power for himself, his nation, his class, his category, his professional group, his future, his past, his ideals, his lust, his licence, his enjoyment, his show, whatever appeals; and as all this varies and often conflicts in the short-sighted short-circuiting of mutual assault, it is a sort of may-day world, madly whirling like some dervish at times, twirled like a Sergeant Major's moustache, very short and bristly, its point coming to nothing.

Man in preferring the insalubrious uncertainties of life apart from the Owner of his house, has made an ass of himself. Imagine now if the whole world in its international power groupings and war makings and God tauntings (the Cross merely made the process the more obvious) were to able to be characterised at once, in one grading ... To be sure, we must not forget the noble characters, the wonderfully loving minority, the God glorifying, Christ loving millions who, though little as a percentage, have the work of salt in the stew (and it IS a stew!). It is not to that which we now refer, but the whole farce of force trampling on the globe. The Greens are not wrong in this, that a limited environment is being trodden on without wisdom or much restraint. They do not however go far enough.

The environment is not only physical and biological, but physiological, cranial, volitional, moral, spiritual and above all, that of the divine. This is, certainly, ultra-environmental in any ordinary sense; but for all that, it is THERE, and if neglected, the result is marring of man himself,  which in turn leads to a real mission for marring, which is what much of current international history is about, and has long been about, with ever more powerful ingenuities of hatred and contempt for mankind. Christ, we read in Isaiah 52 and Psalm 22, was marred beyond the form of man, smashed out of shape, deformed in agonies and assaults. That is what man did to God when given the opportunity. Ever since he has been doing it in millions, each to the other.

God however, though offered as a sacrifice for sin in the person of His eternal Word become flesh, is not deformable. Only the form of His human exterior could be touched; the dazzling purity of His inward Being, merely made its point, paid the price for those who would receive Him (like cashing a cheque in one sound analogy), so that His output became their input, and they are saved from the disease called sin, that author of pandemonium, source of devilry, grand-stand seat of Satan, himself the personal adversary which is sometimes almost visible in some, leering in unloveliness, acrid in hatred, seeking what is forbidden, stopping at nothing, and worth less than nothing.

In this volume, then, we shall be considering Christ Jesus, the wisdom of God and the power of God, the only rationally attested, scientifically confirmed word from God, and at that, the very wisdom and the power of God, available to mankind. Of this, in conclusion, let us read in I Corinthians 1:22-31 -

For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

"For you see your calling, brethren, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called.

"But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, that no flesh should glory in His presence. But of Him you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God - and righteousness and sanctification and redemption - that, as it is written, 'He who glories, let him glory in the Lord.' "
 
 

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Steady on there brother! WHOSE Church is it ? and who is its LORD ? and what does He say! and what is that which does other ?
 

Chapter 2

Spirituality and the Knowledge of God

Necessities, personalities and profundities
Practicalities and joys

Chapter  3

Purity and Power without Presumption
Majestic Message from Psalm 19

Chapter 4

SEQUENCE AND FLOW IN ISAIAH

AS IN THE CASE OF THE OVERFLOW OF A RESERVOIR
 especially
IN ISAIAH 59-66

Chapter 5

Freedom and Its Assault: SA August 2002

CHAPTER 6

JUDGMENT, LAMENTATION AND THE LOVE THAT LIVES
(for earlier treatments of the two ancient and valorous prophets, and the relevant apologetic significance,  see 
Earth Spasm, Conscience Chasm ... Ch. 3)

CHAPTER 7

The Versatility and Architectural Liberties

of the Spirit of Man

 

CHAPTER 8

 

THE PURPOSE, THE PARODY and the PURITY

Concerning Jesus Christ, the Lord and His Life, Ways, and Witness:

And the prevention of parody by the intervention of original purity

From the Lord of originality

 

APPENDIX

On Biblical History

Proceeding on from our times with Elijah and Elisha, and then the later development of Israel and Judah