IS HELL FOR REAL OR DOES EVERYONE GO TO HEAVEN?

Is Hell for Real or Does Everyone Go to Heaven? is a handy little primer and reminder of this much neglected and very important Biblical doctrine. It also supplies some forceful refutation of the wishful thinking of Fudge, Stott, and the rest of the Universalist/Annihilationist movement that likes to water down the Good News by removing the bad news.

“Every New Testament author writes about the coming future judgment of hell.” p. 37. Therefore, this easy to read book (that can be read in an hour or two), is a timely refresher.   

CUCKOO IN THE NEST

Cuckoo in the Nest

Growing up in Scotland I used to love hearing the cuckoo which always seemed to be far off in the woods somewhere. The bird, of course, gets its name from the sound it makes, yes, that’s an onomatopoeia. If you are the musical type, it is the male that makes the cuc-koo sound during the breeding season. He makes his musical cuc-koo song in streams of ten to twenty with short breaks between bursts. I began writing songs after learning only three major chords on the guitar. The male cuckoo is not far behind. He needs only one more note! His two-note arrangement begins in April as a descending minor third, progressing to a major third through a forth as time goes by with the sweet song fading away in June.

Photo from Internet

I watched a bunch of videos showing cuckoos in the nest. If the cuckoo egg hatches first, the blind baby cuckoo attempts to heave all the other eggs out of the nest! It even has a hollow indent in its back that helps facilitate this “survival of the fittest” endeavour! It’ll shove all the other babies over the edge of the nest if they’ve managed to hatch before it. How does this cuckoo hatchling even know there is an edge at the top of the nest? It’s blind. Where did this weird instinct come from?

The mother and father of this wee parasite sometimes work their evil in tandem. The father distracts the nest’s parent birds so that the mother cuckoo can sneak in and quickly lay the already incubating egg in the host’s nest! They visit many nests. This process is called “brood parasitism.”[1] The cuckoo’s egg, though usually slightly larger, often very much resembles the batch of eggs laid by the host bird.

It was due to his observations of this sort of “cruelty” in nature that helped serve to further harden the father of Darwinism Charles Darwin himself against the God who has revealed Himself in Scripture and creation. “How can a good God allow such cruelty and evil in the world?”

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.[2]

And so Darwin became the “messiah” of the Evolutionists. He would lead them into their “promised land”, a place where God would not get so much as a foot in their door, a place where they could develop theories such a multiverse instead of a universe, a place where there can be multiple alternative realities happening at the same time, yes, a place where everything everywhere happens all at once! Remove God and you remove the Absolute, the Objective, and then everything, including truth, becomes subjective. Your truth and my truth are permitted to blatantly contradict each other, unless, of course, you are trying to state the claims of Jesus Christ. Then you will immediately be ousted from the cosy nest of the blind Postmodernist.

Photo from Internet

Nature, as they say, is “red in tooth and claw.” Yes, it’s a jungle out there! But how come? If God is so good, then why does He allow evil to exist? Their reasoning goes something like this: God is good. Evil is not good. Therefore, because evil exists God does not exist. In other words, what they are saying is that if they were God, they wouldn’t allow cruelty and evil to exist.

If God created His creation and then declared it to be a “very good” creation, then how did cruelty enter in the world? Or does this mean that God created creation with cruelty and evil in it? Well, let’s start by answering that God did call His creation very good, and that Charles Darwin and his fans (and the fans of his teachings) call it very evil, or do they? I once read a book whose title interested me as a Christian, in which its author said,

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no other good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that unhappy poet A.E. Houseman put it:

‘For Nature, heartless, witless Nature

Will neither care nor know.’

DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.[3]

So, we move from Darwin’s cruelty in nature, to Neo-Darwinism’s cruelty in our genes. However, notice that in this universe, this “promised land” of the Neo-Darwinist, “there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no other good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” That blind infant cuckoo in the nest exemplifies this “pitiless indifference” for me. How about for you? Let’s forget about God then, and look for a universe, a multiverse, in which cruelty and evil do not exist. However, as we have already seen, there is nowhere that we can go to escape God the Creator.

“Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.” Psalm 139:7-10. The Christian, of course, finds comfort in these words. However, the Darwinist and Neo-Darwinist don’t, because it means that, even if they try to escape God in their bunker of genes full of DNA, even there God will find them!

So, where does good and evil come from? Let’s state the obvious as we try to answer this question. According to contemporary thought, i.e., Postmodernist philosophy (of which Neo-Darwinism and Everything-Everywhere-All-At-Once-ism are branches and fruit of the same tree, there is no such thing as good or evil. There is only “pitiless indifference.” So, the answer to our question about where does good and evil come from, is that good and evil come from the Bible. These are purely Christian concepts that non-Christians in the West need to borrow to describe what they see around them. Yes, there may be other religions (such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism etc., and all their various sub-branches) that people in the West can borrow from to describe cruelty, but Western jurisprudence (law) was originally and ultimately Bible based. There is good and there is evil. The Bible is the standard of truth, and in courts of law it is decided who is telling the truth – the person who allegedly inflicted the evil deed or the person who allegedly was the recipient the same evil, assault, robbery, rape etc.

So, evil entered into the world when that great originator of cruelty and evil itself, that great father of lies, that great murderer from the beginning, yes, Satan, who hatched his diabolical plan in God’s Garden of Eden. Yes, it was the Lord God Himself who ousted Adam and Eve from His Edenic nest. However, it was on account of the Serpent deceiving Eve, and through her, enticing Adam to eat the forbidden fruit, that he managed to tip Adam and Eve over the edge as it were.

“And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” Genesis 3:8-13.

So, we see that Adam and Eve were unable to hide from God, and even if like that cruel and evil Hitler, they had hidden themselves in some bunker, God would still have found them! Though usually attributed to the American boxer Joe Louis, the saying, “You can run, but you can’t hide!” is the major theme of Amos 9:1-10. Here’s a couple of verses as an example, “If they dig into Sheol, from there shall my hand take them; if they climb up to heaven, from there I will bring them down. If they hide themselves on the top of Carmel, from there I will search them out and take them; and if they hide from my sight at the bottom of the sea, there I will command the serpent, and it shall bite them.” Amos 9:2-3.

There is nowhere we can hide from God, not even in death. “Sheol” means the grave. So, Satan is that great cruel and evil cuckoo in the nest who set about destroying the occupants of Eden. (We’ll look at it later, but this particular “cuckoo” has more than a dent in his back, he now has a crushed head! Thank You Jesus!) 

So, you may view the whole world as being cuckoo, but now you know where it all comes from. It was through Satan that cruelty and evil entered God’s creation. And Jesus refers to those who, instead of following God, follow Satan’s rebellion against Him, as “You brood of vipers!” Matthew 3:7. Yes, he started in God’s Garden of Eden, but Satan has been laying parasitical eggs all over the world and the blind hatchlings are trying to oust Christ and His followers out of their dystopian world. But “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.” Psalm 24:1. Well, at least the Bible doesn’t leave you wondering who is going to win in the end! All non-Christian religion, which includes Neo-Darwinism, Postmodernism etc., like Satan himself, is parasitical. It lays its eggs in God’s world. And now that Postmodernism has flown in, it can lay an egg in the many nests of the multiverse. However, because God owns His creation, it has to borrow from Christianity and be fed by it if it is to survive. The concept of good and evil (with its attendant cruelty) is an example of this.

We should note that, according to the Bible, only humans and angels are moral agents, i.e., will be judged by Jesus on Judgment Day. Animals just do what animals do, and if any of it looks good or cruel and evil to you, it is because you are morally judging what you are seeing around you, e.g., the cuckoo. You, not the animals and not the others around you, but you will be judged by God because you are not living up to your own set of morals, the morals by which you judge the good and evil you see around you. You don’t live up to these morals. Neither do I. We are cruel at times. God doesn’t want our cruelty in His world. He will punish it. That is why He sent His Son into the world. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” John 3:16-17. 

So, do cuckoos belong to Darwin’s alternate universe or are they simply creatures that have well-adapted themselves for survival in a fallen creation? Surely the latter is the way Occam’s razor would slice it? Why go to all the trouble of inventing theories and searching for missing links to fill in the gaps and billions of years to accommodate your postulations, when “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” will do? Yes, something happened to God’s good creation. We call it the fall. It happened when Adam and Eve colluded with the Serpent and joined in his rebellion against God.

So, what did God do about it?  Well, ultimately, He sent His Son into the world to redeem it, i.e., to fix it. This will all be finalised on Judgment Day. But immediately after the fall, here’s what God did: “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Genesis 3:17-19.

Here's the place where Darwin went wrong in his thinking. He thought that the cruelty and evil he was seeing in nature was the way that God had designed His creation to be, and not the result of mankind’s rebellion, including Darwin’s continuation of that rebellion. Before the fall, there was only good. After the fall, i.e., after Adam and Eve had eaten the fruit of the tree of good and evil, all human beings know good and evil and would have to be “cuckoo” not to see it when it is around you and even in you. 

Photo from Internet

Those who believe in Jesus are looking forward to a glorious future, a future in which cruelty and evil will be vanquished, a future in which the lion and the lamb will lie down together, “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.” Romans 8:20-22.

Meanwhile back at the Garden of Eden,  

“Then the Lord God said, ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—’ therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.” Genesis 3:24.  

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[1] Brood parasitism (creation.com)

[2] Letter To Asa Gray, 1860.

[3] Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden, Phoenix, 1996, 155.

EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE

Everywhere All at Once

If you are already a Christian and have attempted to tell a non-Christian person about Jesus, you will already have noticed that they behave like a flea on a hotplate! They won’t stay still. They jump around with all their “whataboutisms”. You know, “Well, if there is a god, then why is there so much evil in the world?” “Why doesn’t He show Himself?” “It was just a bunch of goatherders that wrote the Bible!” “The Bible is a bunch of Chinese whispers passed down through the ages and is used by the church to dupe stupid people!”

Image from Net

Apologies if I seem to have been jumping around like a flea there as I listed some of the excuses people use to not listen to you telling them about Jesus. You can add your own complaints to this list if you like. However, I’m going to take the Apostle Paul approach as I try to get you to listen to what I have to say about Jesus. Notice what he said when he was talking to some people in Athens. He wants them to know that he is not ignorant of their culture. How does he do this? He engages them by quoting from a couple of their own poets. However, notice that he has a purpose in mind. He wants to tell them about his grandkids? No, he wants to tell them about Jesus. But first he starts by telling them about God and who He is and our relationship as human beings to Him.

“For ‘In Him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are indeed His offspring.’” Acts 17:28. 

The first of the two quotes is probably from Epimenides, a poet from Crete. And the other is from a poem Phainomena by a guy called Aratus. We take it that the ears of these men Paul was talking to would’ve pricked up when they heard him quote from their fellow Greeks. Paul was really good at this sort of thing. For the rest of us it can be a bit like the roller shutters coming down at tucker shop closing time when we try to talk about the things of God to some people! We see a glazed look begin to appear in their eyes. They may begin to look at their watch or phone and give other social cues that they are done with you.

We press on! In order for humanity to live and move and have our being in God, He would need to be everywhere all at once. And this is exactly what God reveals about Himself in the Bible. He encapsulates everything everywhere all at once. This, of course, is not to say that everything is God. It simply means that God is the creator of everything everywhere. There is nothing outside of His creation except Him. However, if you or I built a house, we could move into that house. But we could only be in one room at a time. God is not like us. He is in every room of every house and in every nook and cranny of His universe because all of Him is everywhere all at once. This everywhere-at-once-ness of God is called Omnipresence.

Next, God knows all things. He knows the beginning, middle and end of all things. And He knows everything all at once. God’s knowing-everything-all-at-once-ness is called Omniscience. And there is one more attribute of God that we need to know about, and that is His Almightiness. He is Almighty God, Omnipotent. Let’s list those three attributes that belong only to God, and then we’ll move on: Omnipresence, Omniscience and Omnipotence. Put simply, God is the Creator and we, along with the rest of His creation, are simply creatures dwelling in His creation in which He is present and can see all things and can do all things. So, when Paul says, “For we are indeed His offspring” he means that we have been created by God.

The One and the Many

Because God is three Persons in one God, He is the original One and Many. And because He is Creator, we should expect to see many reflections of His Oneness and Many-ness in all of His handiwork, and we should expect to see little clusters of “trinities” in everything everywhere.

The Creator created space, time and matter. When did He create time? “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” So, time first began when God created it, and as He created time, He was creating space into which He placed the matter He was creating. “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” Exodus 20:11a. God distinguished one day in the cycle of every seven as a special day, a holy day.

So, time can be measured by days, cycles of seven. And as we live and move and have our being in Him, He has given us six days to work with Him and one day a week to rest with Him. And notice why God created the sun, the moon and the stars: “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.’ And it was so. And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars.” Genesis 1:14-16.

So, time is measured by the sun, the moon and the stars on their courses and cycles, days, months and years. Tides and female human menstrual cycles even fit into God’s sovereign plan. And the eternal God, who knows the end from the beginning, is reflected in the trinity of past, present and future.

And what about space? God was nowhere before He created space because there wasn’t anywhere to be. But now that He has created space, He is everywhere all at once. He is in the longest lengths, the deepest depths and the highest heights. For He, the triune God, made the three dimensions of length, breadth and height. He is at the outermost reaches of His universe, and He is in the minutest atoms. All of Him is everywhere all at once! “For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.” Colossians 1:16.

So, whether through a telescope or a microscope or with the naked eye, everything we can see and even the things that we cannot see, were created by God for God. Even the trinity in matter of solid, liquid, gas/vapour, yes, ice, water, steam.

“A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north; around and around goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again.” Ecclesiastes 1:4-7.

Yes, God has a plan and, because He knows the end from the beginning, through circuits and cycles, He carries out His plan, working in space, in time and in matter. “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” Romans 8:28.

A KNOCK ON YOUR DOOR

 

A KNOCK ON YOUR DOOR 

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1

An old guy used to knock on my door unannounced usually on a Saturday morning. Invariably, it would be at the most inopportune time. I’d be busy in the backyard or cleaning my fish tank or something. I’m sure you’ve had the same experience? Well, the first time the old guy knocked on my door I said to him, “You are here to tell me that Jesus is not God. Well, I am here to tell you that He is! You go first.” And then we’d crack open our Bibles. The old guy was persistent. He kept on coming back periodically. He usually had one of his older granddaughters with him. Eventually we just had nice conversations about our grandkids.

Does it really matter if Jesus is God or not? For that matter, does it really matter if God exists or not? What difference does it make whether God exists or that Jesus is God? Well, with all the books and movies coming out nowadays, you’d think that God and Jesus don’t matter and that we live in a universe that has no rhyme or reason to it. Indeed, they talk more about a multi-verse more than a uni-verse. Well, like I said to the fellow grandad who used to knock on my door, “You are here to tell me that Jesus is not God. Well, I am here to tell you that He is! You go first.”

Okay, it’s really hard to have a conversation with someone when they are reading. So, I suppose I’ll do most of the talking. But please feel free to express out loud any disagreements we may be having.

Right, you don’t believe in all that God stuff? Science has disproved it! And you don’t believe all that Bible stuff? Chinese whispers! Whoops! You think it’s inappropriate to refer to things by their ethnicity? Danish bacon, Scottish haggis, English breakfast tea, Canadian back bacon, Italian marble, but not Chinese whispers? Wow! You live in a strange world, a weird universe. Oh wait! I forgot. You live in a multiverse. You live in a place where wearing kilts and traditional Scottish dress is frowned upon as “cultural appropriation”. Inappropriate for some reason. Does one need to be Chinese to order a Chinese takeaway or Mexican to eat at Taco Bell? Can the son of a Scottish father and a Mexican mother wear a sombrero with their tartan kilt? Or is it either one or the other? Are we from different planets? Oh wait! We ought not to use the terms father or mother? And we shouldn’t refer to a male child as someone’s son? A Mexican is guilty of cultural appropriation if he wears traditional Scottish dress, but a man can dress-up as a woman and compete as a female in women's sports? Oh, let’s just talk about our grandkids instead of arguing about these things!

Is it safe to use the phrase, “The elephant in the room”? Or do we have to stipulate whether it’s an African elephant or an Indian elephant before we go there? Or is the mere mention of the words Africa or India some kind of “dog whistle” to those who live in a universe/multiverse where everyone is afraid of being accused of cultural appropriation? Well, let me start by talking about the elephant in the room…

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” Genesis 1:1-3. The Rev Prof Dr Francis Nigel Lee wrote a brief foreword for a book I published way back in 2006. In it, referring to Genesis 1:1-3 in particular he said, “God tri-une, at the start, created the tri-universe”. So, though not quite the multiverse of contemporary, i.e., Postmodernist, thought, we see that there are three aspects to what is known as the universe. Dr Lee spells it out elsewhere,

“God Triune, at the beginning, created the tri-universe (two-heavens-and-one-earth). Gen. 1:1f. The first heaven is the air surrounding our earth, and an integral part thereof (Gen. 1:6). The second heaven is outer space, and the third heaven is the dwelling-place of God’s good angels (II Cor. 12:2). All three, like the Three Persons within God Triune Himself, interpenetrate and overlap one another — which is quite what one would expect creatures of God Triune to do. Indeed, this is what Rev. Prof. Dr. Cornelius Van Til meant by ‘the one and the many.’ I Cor. 12:12-20.”[1]

So, here we see where that door-knocking granddad and I disagree with each other. Because he denies that there are “Three Persons within God Triune Himself”, he disagrees that Jesus is God. He thinks that Jesus, like the angels, the air surrounding our earth, outer space, the entire universe, is a creature like all the other creatures created by God, some just listed.

To deny that Jesus is God is to deny that God is Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Christians are baptized into one name, not three names: “Baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Matthew 28:19b. So, my fellow granddad was in error thinking that Jesus was not God the Son who entered into His creation as a fully human being at the very first Christmas. We see then that Jesus is God and Man in one divine Person forever. How do we know? Because the Bible tells us so.

“Chinese whispers”? Well, like my fellow granddad has done with Jesus, so some people likewise do with the Bible. They like to change the Bible to suit their own purposes. Their main purpose being to deny the God who has revealed Himself therein. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” has become garbled down through the ages. It is now “The multiverse just is.” What’s the multiverse? To use a movie title it is, Everything Everywhere All at Once. There is no God. There is no beginning. There is no rhyme or reason. It is only formless and void, chaos.

Yes, I’d rather talk about my grandkids than the weird things some people believe, but I was reminded the other day when lying face down on a table as my physiotherapist stabbed, poked, prodded and massaged my busted shoulders and neck that, now more than ever, people need to hear about Jesus. Why? Because of what He will do for those who belong to Him: “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” Revelation 21:4.

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[1] God Triune in the Beginning – and for the 21^st Century: Dr F N Lee - Sermon God Triune in the Beginning – and for the 21st Century Page 2 (dr-fnlee.org)

HITTING THE TARGET

 

“At great turning-points of world-history, man’s historical consciousness is strongly aroused. The relativity of our traditional measures and opinions manifests itself in a clear way. At these historical turning points those who do not live by the Word of God and who had considered these traditional measures and opinions to be the firm ground of their personal and societal life, easily fall prey to a state of spiritual uprooting, in which they surrender themselves to a radical relativism, which has lost all faith in an absolute truth.”

(‘In the Twilight of Western Thought: Studies in the Pretended Autonomy of Philosophical Thought’ by Herman Dooyeweerd, Paideia Press 2012, Series B, Volume 4, p 45)

 My big brother Fearghas (artist, Gaelic poet, published author etc.) sent me the above quote. Fearghas has been a student of Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977) for many years and the lines of his thought (as clearly evidenced below) are very indebted to his writings. His blog is found at: Mouse in a Glass: Luch sa Ghlainne (mouseglass.blogspot.com)

We interacted as follows:

Fearghas & Neil

NEIL: I like the Dooyeweerd quote. He mentions that “…those who do not live by the Word of God … easily fall prey to a state of spiritual uprooting…”

I suppose Jesus’s Parable of the Sower (with the seeds and soils) applies here. So, it’s all about God’s Word taking deep root in the soil of Holy Spirit-prepared hearts.

As we say, the sword of Lord (which is the Word of God) is our best defence – against all would-be invaders of God’s Garden. For, Satan, our enemy, likes to sow weeds amongst God’s crops. The sword of the Lord is the ploughshare by which we cut down both the wheat and the tares. God harvests the former for His Kingdom and the latter for His Furnace. We are merely labourers in His fields.

Rudi Schwartz and I have laboured hard writing our book (The Unfaithful Bride & The Faithful Groom), in which we have tried very hard to communicate to the intelligent reader, how to, among other things, Scripturally discern the wiles of the devil – both inside and outside Christ’s Kingdom on earth.

Inside the Kingdom the subtle Serpent attempts to uproot the Word from hearts or at least stunt growth and outside he seeks to prevent the seed of the Word from being sown, by making sure the ground remains stoney and always in the shadows.

A blunderbuss is needed to scare away and even blast garden pests, and I think Rudi and I have succeeded in this area. Metaphorically speaking, (like the “Glorious Twelfth” in Scotland!), we had a field day blasting every wind of doctrine that winged our way.

To slightly change the metaphor, Satan has Christianity running-ragged as Christians tilt their lances at every windmill. Evil seems to be ubiquitous, popping up its ugly head in, eg restaurants, movie theatres, doctors’ offices, Xray Clinics, hospitals, kindergartens, public libraries, colleges, schools, universities, retail stores, beer!, the White House, yes, even churches!

However, I wonder if there is a target that we could aim our large calibre high velocity weapons of spiritual warfare at (perhaps in a future book). What/where is the heart of the matter? David struck Goliath directly on his forehead. I feel as if we Christians are fighting on too many fronts at the moment (from Darwinism to Dispensationalism, from Socialism to Secularism, Arminianism to Wokeism, Premillennialism to Postmodernism, basic Socialism to Cultural Marxism etc.).

Dooyeweerd points directly at the heart of the matter: too many Christians are NOT living by the Word of God. The question then is, as Francis Schaeffer puts it in his book title “How Should We Then Live?” In other words, how should we glorify God and enjoy Him forever?

I know I’ve sort of answered my own question here, but what do you think Fearghas? How do we convince Christians to live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God? 

FEARGHAS: Humanism is in crisis. It is currently shifting from its classical objectivistic mechanistic rationalistic polarity (which presupposes the abiding normative laws of mathematics and physics — a clockwork UNI-verse model, if you like), to its post-postmodernist subjectivistic irrationalistic personalistic polarity (ie radically rejecting all normativity as it sinks into a black-hole of infinite flux — a haywire MULTI-verse model of alternative cosmic realities, if you like — see (with visual health warning) the recent Oscar-winning Michelle Yeoh movie ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’), but also the dissolution of human normativity into potentially non-regulated acid-baths of experimental bio-engineering, transhumanism, and AI consciousness. The ultra-relativism of the latter subjectivistic polarity infamously rejects for instance the normative laws of biology in regards to the trans debate, but it rejects also the normative laws of speech and civilised discourse which undergird the negotiated social peace upon which democracy is premised — hence its modus operandi presents (counter-intuitively perhaps) as strident intransigence, governmental absolutism, raw mob power, infantilised hysteria, all symbolised by the iconic weapon of baby-pink-and-blue-painted baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire. 

The objectivist rationalist polarity of humanism was a hugely pernicious and resolute opponent of Christ and His Word, giving rise to so-called Higher Criticism and to the moral blankness of mechanistic selfish-gene High Darwinism. All of which as we know have presented relentless challenges to Biblical accounts of the miraculous, but above all to the substitutionary death and resurrection of Christ. 

The new beast from the sea, however, manifests in its subjectivism as a shape-shifting, obsessively personalistic, ultra-relativistic tyrant. Our retaliation would seem to require renewed focus on the incarnation of Christ, of course along with his sacrificial death, resurrection and ascension — his embodiment in birth, in resurrection and in ascension providing the definitive endorsement of human and creational normativity. He is the True Man. He is the Last Adam. We are made in his likeness, in the image of God. There does not exist an infinity of conflicting variations of my or your selfhood populating endless random universes. THIS cosmos is all there is, and we are the stewards of it. This cosmos is from him through him and to him. He upholds all things by his word of power. He reconciles all things in heaven and earth by the blood of his cross. This whole creation groans in travail as it waits for that day, the redemption of our bodies, being a new creation which in some deep sense will yet be a continuation of this one, as our resurrected bodies will have unfathomable continuity with our present bodies. 

This cosmos fell with the First Adam and is rescued by the Last Adam. We must emphasise all the more the structural norms of this creation (eg binary maleness-femaleness, eg the family unit optimally being comprised of mother, father, and progeny, eg the integrity of animals “according to their kinds”) — but also the exhaustive structural frameworks which comprise temporal reality in its totality, these are the concrete ordinances of the Lord, as the psalmist tells us. God’s creational ordinances have not as such fallen with man. They have not as such been corrupted by sin. God’s creational laws remain transcendently intact. Only the heart of Man has fallen, in its daily rebellion rejecting the pristine given-ness of God’s creational order, and in arrogant delusion attempting to level it all to dust and to rebuild it from scratch in the image of apostate humanity. 

LOVE

The bonnie, bonnie banks o' Loch Lomond

‘God is love’ (1 John 4:8,16). If it’s true that love is more a verb than a noun, then what did God, who is love, do? ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’ (Gen. 1:1). ‘For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day’ (Exo. 20:11). And, like Father like Son, Jesus says, ‘My Father has been working until now, and I have been working’ (John 5:17). So, God (who is love) brought creation into being over a period of six days. He did it verbally, ‘By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth’ (Ps. 33:6). ‘By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible’ (Heb. 11:3).

God is love because the three Persons in the Godhead love each other eternally from eternity unto eternity. The three persons are one God. ‘For there are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit; and these three are one’ (1 John 5:7). Some Bibles may miss out this verse, but it is Biblically true nevertheless. For in the beginning the Father spoke the Word and Their Spirit brought creation into being.

Yes, in the Godhead, God loves God, and each Person loves His neighbour as Himself. If love were the ball in a pinball machine, then to reflect the Godhead, it would need to ping back and forth perpetually and keep on running up a score forever.

But does God love anything other than Himself? ‘For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life’ (John 3:16). So we see that God loves the world. And we see that this love is not an emotional feeling as humans tend to describe love. ‘Love Hurts’ and ‘I Feel Love’ are a couple of well-known songs that describe love as a feeling. However, God’s love for the world is a ‘doing’ love. He sent His Son into the world. ‘And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ (John 1:14a). But what happened when God entered His creation on the planet earth as a human being? Do we love the One who is love and made us in His own image that we should be like Him and love God and our neighbour as ourselves? Well, it looks like the ones that don’t love Jesus are going to perish. Clearly, only those who believe in Him will receive everlasting life rather than perishing in hellish torments forever, i.e., everlasting death as opposed to everlasting life.

How can the Scriptures reveal that God is love if He sends people to hell? Well, we’ll leave that for God to answer the individual on Judgment Day. But for now, God is expressing His love for the world by inviting everyone to believe in His Son and be saved. However, no one will believe in the Son unless they are born of the Spirit. (John 3:5-8). We breathe out to speak. The ‘Breath’ of the Father and the Word must speak to our hearts before we will believe unto everlasting life. ‘For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death’ (Rom. 8:2).

The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who have been loving each Other from eternity, are extending that love to whoever will believe in Jesus. Why would anyone reject this offer? You’d have to really hate God to not accept His offer of everlasting love in everlasting life. Why would anyone not prefer everlasting bliss over everlasting torment? Perhaps it may be because they do not believe? For, ‘whoever believes in Him should not perish’. God is love. Accept Him. And accept His offer of love while you yet have breath.