The Collapse of the Universe Into A Consciousness

In this study we will be discussing the contrasts that exist between the role of human consciousness as opposed to Scripture or the consciousness of the Creator. We will define these terms as we go through and study the text. This subject matter is very important today just as it has always been due to the fact that man has sanctified his own thought processes and this is a grave sin. In fact, the Bible refers to it as idolatry. Thus we will present the difference between the mental act of induction and biblical deduction. Induction is man-centered whereas biblical deduction always starts with God and thus maintains Scripture in the agent position and the reader in the patient position. Scripture must be the sole guide for life on the planet and it can only serve as guide when human intelligence is submitted to revelation. Human intelligence cannot be allowed to map meaning onto the text and human experience must not be allowed to be in the drivers seat. Such a hermeneutic is degenerate and will always render a false picture of both God and man’s relationship to Him.

The Sensorium
Let us first discuss the nature of the universe. We must begin with the exact position of the Scripture. That is, that the material universe is not a myth nor an allusion, it is indeed a concrete reality. The universe and all that is associated with it exists. It is not a figment of our imagination. With this in mind, we must recognize how we as human beings have been created.

God created us in such a way that we deal with the world around us in an indirect way. What we mean is this: When we look at objects within the material world we really see only a copy of what is actually there. In other words, light strikes an object and travels the distance between the object and one’s eyes. A copy of the object, therefore, is then projected into one’s retinas that consequently sends a message into the cerebral cortex inside the brain which then stores the copy of the object as an icon of the real, actual object.

As one can easily ascertain, only a representation of the object exists inside of one’s head. This is true of all five senses (touch, taste, see, hear, smell) with which the Lord has created man. For example, if we have an apple pie placed before us our sensorium creates (by our five senses) a series of representations in our minds about the apple pie itself. For instance, not only is one seeing the copy of the apple pie but also one concurrently is dealing with the other representations associated with the apple pie. For instance, one may have the smell associated with the apple pie, the delicious, attractive, irresistible aroma. With this representation (icon) stored in one’s mind, one can always recall the smell of an apple pie because the smell is detached from the object itself and an icon is created which will forever remain in the mind. Therefore one is not dealing directly with the pie (one doesn’t have an actual apple pie inside of his head), but only with the icon of the pie. One can touch or taste the pie and separate those icons in his mind so that even if he never sees an apple pie again he knows the taste and smell of apple pie. For the exact same reason one knows the taste of his mother’s apple pie. One has a copy of that taste forever in his mind. Consequently when one goes to Luby’s to eat and orders a slice of apple pie he may express the fact that this apple pie does not taste like his mother’s and perhaps it doesn’t smell like hers either. He is able to decipher and compare the different taste and smell due to the icons of smell and taste that were stored in his brain when he ate his mother’s apple pie as he was growing up.

Again, one’s experience of the apple pie is dependent upon the sensorium. If one cannot see the apple pie, if one cannot smell the apple pie, if one cannot touch the apple pie, if one cannot taste it or perhaps if it made a sound, hear it, then one cannot have an experience of it. All human experiences are dependent upon the sensorium. Whether it be rafting down a river, fishing in the ocean or kissing the cheek of one’s child, all experiences are dependent upon the sensorium. If we take this example and apply it to the whole of the material universe we come to the conclusion that we are dealing not with the actual material objects but rather with copies of them in our minds. In other words, the Lord has created within us a kind of limitation of how we perceive and deal with the material world around us.

This has a number of extraordinary implications. Since the Lord has placed within each one of us a designed limitation, one must come to recognize what those limitations mean. If one is dealing only with the sensations of the world around him and not dealing directly with the actual objects, how then is one to understand the world? How is one to relate to it? One must therefore come to appreciate the role of his consciousness. For the universe boils down to one’s appraisal of it or one’s consciousness of it as given to one by the senses. With this in mind one comes to understand the remarkable role that Scripture must play in one’s life.

The Lord has asked human beings not to operate by sight but rather by faith. He says “We live by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7) In other words, he is telling man not to direct his life on the basis of his sensorium (Prov. 3:5-6). The Lord would tell man not to trust what he sees. This great truth is born out in the Bible time and time again. One cannot just place all of his trust in what he evaluates with his senses since it does not present the entire picture but rather only fragments. Although the Lord has given man the sensorium, he forbids him to use it as the sole interpreter of the material world or its events. It does not present the whole picture and cannot provide all of the information needed for one to be objective. Stated another way, human experience will always fall short.

A number of illustrations prove this to be the point. In the account of Pharaoh, for example, who would have thought that a solitary Jew coming out of the desert would have been able to bring his empire to its knees in a matter of only a few days?. Or who would have thought that one could have reached the point of the Red Sea only to have it open up before his very eyes. The fact that there was fear in the hearts of the Israelites as they stood at the shore, and certainly that there was a certain confidence in the heart of Pharaoh and his entourage, was built upon the reality conceived of by the sensorium. But one certainly must comprehend that the sensorium cannot tell him everything that he needs to know concerning life on this planet.

Now if we can go that far together in our discussion that means that our experiences are reduced to our consciousness of things. That is, after all, the definition of human experience. And we have already discovered that our consciousness is built around the senses. That is, one does not have direct contact with anything but rather he only has contact with the sensations or the icons created in his brain. Therefore, my understanding of the universe boils down to my consciousness of it. And your understanding of the universe boils down to your consciousness of it. Let us then discuss what this means and some of the more unattractive qualities that go along with it.

Statistical Regularity
Human consciousness always looks for what we will call “statistical regularity.” One’s experience tells him that if he holds a brick up over his foot and drops it time after time the brick will fall and will hurt. We even go so far as to have almanacs with charts that predict the comings and goings of the tides. Moreover, by observation we have chronicled the locomotions of the heavenly bodies so that we can foresee where they may be at any given time. But notice, however, that these repeatable occurrences are not sufficient in order to form a foundation on which to base life. Nevertheless, man does pick up the idea of a kind of regularity, and if one wanted to put numbers to it one could call it a statistical regularity. We watch the tides, the planets and we observe the function of gravity. These are paramount examples on a physical plane of the use of statistical regularity.

Thus, by the time Moses goes to Egypt to deliver his people, the Egyptians had been recording the rise and the fall of the Nile River for long periods of time due to the fact that their planting and agricultural industries depended upon knowing when these things would occur. Thus calendars come into being for these very same reasons. Consequently it is extremely important that we look at the elements of statistical regularity.

Why do we look for statistical regularity? Remember that our view of the tides is an iconic representation of the tides. If we go down to the ocean to watch the tide come in, we will only have saved in our brains a picture or a copy of the tide coming in. It is this iconic representation of the tides that one deals with inside of his head, not the tides themselves. Thus statistical regularity plays a very important role in how one sees and observes his surroundings. In fact, it is very important to the minds of people in that they depend upon the symmetry and patterns to tell them what they most need to know. When the Israelites are sent on their forty day recon mission into the land of the Amorites in the book of Numbers, we find that they were operating on statistical regularity. When they came back ten of them said “the walls are too, the population is too vast, and the giants are too big.” Statistically speaking they could have said: If people like us, (a motley group, not a well trained military organization, a people without the necessary siege engines and, after all, a people without giants), go up against a group of people like them it always ends in defeat. This, of course, is a kind of statistical regularity. We could also draw another illustration concerning statistical regularity from 1 Samuel 17 in the Valley of Elah when David faces Goliath. Statistically speaking, and everybody there in the valley, except David, knew on that day, including Goliath, that statistically speaking when nine-foot-tall giants come up against sixteen-year-old boys armed with a sling shot, statistically speaking the young boy is going to be killed. Obviously, David did not believe such a thing. But, obviously, Goliath and the whole host of Philistine soldiers that accompanied him did and so did that the new found king in Israel as well as the rest of the Israelites. One can easily see this in the text since it states that the Israelites were cringing in fear. Why were they so afraid? They were frightened because of statistical regularity, the icons and the inductions that were at work in their minds.

Since the advent of what is referred to as the Scientific Revolution, for the last three or four hundred years or so, people have been very interested in the mathematization of nature. That is, an attempt to put numbers on everything or to relate to everything by measuring it. Moreover, man has come up with the idea of statistical regularity. Perhaps the ancients didn’t immediately begin to think in terms of algebraic centers and calculus or other formal systems of mathematics, but they did however understand the idea of regularity and what amounted to statistical regularity or, we may say, a consciousness of its existence. We must point out again that this consciousness of patterns and symmetry is built upon the sensorium and, thus, not objective.

Now today, it would seem, we have the same choice to make. Remember, the universe presents itself to each one of us on the basis of his consciousness of it. And if in this one tries to put things together in some kind of interconnected way so that he can see patterns or establish what amounts to statistical regularity, then he has done the exact same thing as those in the aforementioned examples in the Old Testament. Another case that exemplifies this would be the apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 1. He felt that he was going to die when they were in Asia. He was wrong about his situation although all the indications to the contrary presented themselves to him through his sensorium. That is, the situation presented itself to him through his senses. He had a consciousness of it and an experience of it but his interpretation of it was wrong. Now this pragmatic example reminds us of the way in which man typically uses statistical regularity. This, in fact, represents the predominant way in which the human consciousness operates.

The Mental Act of Induction
Let us approach at this point in our study what is commonly referred to as the mental operation called induction. If one were to draw a series of X’s on one side of a page and let those X’s symbolize all of the experiences that one has about where a small, unprepared military force goes up against a well fortified, well armed, well trained and motivated force, one would infer from experience that the smaller, less equipped, less trained military force would normally lose the war. That is the way in which statistical regularity operates. Induction then takes a number of particular cases, represented by those X’s, and then proceeds to apply what one thinks he has learned from that series of experiences. Then by an act of the will he maps it on to his present, everyday, common experiences. In other words, the Israelites, at Kadesh, in the book of Numbers, knew or thought they knew that time after time if they, unprepared as they were, went up against well fortified cities in Canaan, they would, without doubt, be defeated and would be destroyed. They took all of those experiences, all of those impressions that they had and they mapped it onto their particular case. That mental operation is the act of induction. People are going to almost automatically lean to induction because it is built upon statistical regularity—it is built on human consciousness. Human consciousness will amass a series of experiences and then use those to understand every upcoming experience that is similar in kind. Therefore, one could fairly state that one who operates in this manner has an inductive approach to life. This all sounds very reasonable, of course, but induction is not a Biblical frame of reference for those who are trying to put their faith in something that has been revealed from God to them directly through the avenue of Scripture. And in some ways is still being revealed by God’s interaction with individuals.

Induction is a problem. The reason why one knows that if he puts his hand on a hot oven today he will be burned is because of all of the experiences he has had in the past. He takes those series of remembrances, or iconic representations, and maps them on to this potential case and concludes “I am going to be burned if I touch that hot oven.” That is an inductive act. It makes a lot of sense at one level and yet it becomes quite a problem for believers because it gets out of its banks—it becomes the basis for understanding life. In addition to induction, what occurs here ultimately is what we will call the “search for necessary conditions.”
The reason why people create statistical regularity and the reason why they make notes and try to establish equations is to help them understand the various regularities such as the goings and comings of the tides. Let’s suppose you worked for NASA and were involved in a launch project. Obviously you would want to know the regular movements of the celestial bodies. Because remember they needed to know where the heavenly bodies would be at a given time in order to sling shot the Voyager around certain celestial bodies. Thus one can see that this operates at every conceivable level. It permeates science, economics, biology as well as the differing philosophies of life.

What does this mean with reference to our health? When one goes into a medical establishment and has a medical problem, the doctors are going to act inductively. There will be a number of cases that are similar to the patient and that will represent the series of X’s and they will take all of those and map them onto the patient. It is purely an act of induction. This helps man search for necessary conditions. People want to know how they compare to all others in order to see the statistical regularity or chances they have to recover from their illness. For instance, in the book of Exodus we might want to ask the question: What are the necessary conditions for the overthrow of the Egyptian empire? What would be the necessary conditions for winning the freedom of the Israelites? What are the necessary conditions for the crossing of the Red Sea? Or when the Jews stood at the walls of Jericho, what were the necessary conditions for them to come down? Or even more pertinently we might ask: How do we search for the necessary conditions pertaining to our own survival? Each individual with whom we work and perhaps ourselves want to know what are the necessary conditions for our economic survival? If my child becomes ill, we all want to know what are the necessary conditions for the healing of my child? We want to know what are the necessary conditions when one is sixty-five and needs to retire or when one becomes ill and will need to have some kind of financial income. What are the necessary conditions associated with all of those things? What are the necessary conditions for one to have a house and a car. What are the necessary conditions, shall we say, for a church to grow? Now our friends of the church growth persuasion, of course, ask all kinds of questions associated with necessary conditions. What are the necessary conditions for our congregations to numerically expand? What are the necessary conditions for it to have the kind of financing we would need for such a venture? Necessary conditions, as you can see, take place at every conceivable layer in the lives that man lives. Now that’s all part of a common picture. Human consciousness seeks for statistical regularity. It seeks to interplay a series of iconic experiences that it has had. It tries to see some pattern, some organization, some cause and effect relationship between these various experiences and then attempts to use them. Notice that the means of employing this regularity will be the mental act of induction. And man uses induction so that he can ask the pertinent questions relative to the search for necessary conditions.

Again, what are necessary conditions? One can easily see that induction as a way of thought was given to man by God, but was to be constrained within certain boundaries. But man’s idea is that induction is the only way to be “reasonable,” “practical” or “rational” and thus human beings have sanctified induction as the only valid thought process. Human beings believe that sanctified induction will tell them the truth about themselves and their world. The problem is that the Lord contradicts that idea definitively all through the written record of revelation.

The Biblical Act of Deduction
Now let us discuss the opposite view. All of this on the right hand side of the thematic is exactly where the human race is today. It is many times where churches are and how Christians are most apt to think and apt to express themselves. Now let us take a look at a very different point of view relative to the universe.

Once again we know and take for granted that the universe is a concrete reality; it does in fact exist, it is not an allusion. We now have an opportunity, since the universe boils down to a consciousness, of asking the question: What consciousness becomes the best interpreter of the concrete material world? The biblical position is that the consciousness of the Creator is the favored approach to understanding the material universe.

Now remember, the physical universe, as far as we are concerned comes to us through our consciousness of it. That means, therefore, that when one has an experience in the material world it is because of his consciousness of the material world. And my consciousness of the material world is born of the sensations or the icons that I have of it. So therefore, for man, his first contact with the world is his consciousness of it. Now, the important question that arises is: Should man rely on human consciousness? Or should he rely on the consciousness of the Creator? When we are told in Scripture not to walk by sight but rather to walk by faith (2 Cor. 5:7). Is he not saying very directly and very specifically that we are not to walk according to human consciousness because it will end up being a dead end and that it will only carry one so far. (Does that not precisely echo Proverbs 3:5-6 and Jeremiah 10:23?) The human consciousness, or what we can refer to as self-reference, only has limited use, and instead of walking by sight, one should walk by faith and walking by faith constitutes relying on the consciousness of the Creator.

The consciousness of the Creator, therefore, becomes our window into the material universe. What that means is that man is going to have to chuck to some decree or another dependence upon human consciousness. What we have here is a very basic issue: Does the Bible represent a world picture or not? That is the question, after all. Or, does human consciousness present a world picture? And should man put faith in his world picture? Clearly there is no question that human consciousness does present a world picture. One can see this, without doubt, in the face of Pharaoh in the exodus. His consciousness presented him with a world picture. The same thing was true of the Israelites in the whole exodus experience. That is why they were fearful at the Red Sea when they saw the chariots of Pharaoh coming in their direction. They knew what this meant statistically speaking, and they inducted it onto their particular place and situation. They were asking themselves: What are the necessary conditions for our survival here? They came to the conclusion that there were conditions and that those conditions were not in place. So consequently they concluded that they would all be slaughtered. Later on when they were in the desert, as the desert presented itself to them in their consciousness, they looked at statistical regularity and declared: “Well people like us with this number of mouths to feed and water always die in this type of situation.” They asked: What are the necessary conditions for us to survive? They did not think that those necessary conditions had been met, so consequently they complained to Moses saying “the Lord has brought out here to die.” That was a supreme manifestation of faithlessness. Paul cited this example in 1 Corinthians 10 and the Hebrew writer made the same reference so that the readers of all ages would not be rebellious like they were.

If we operate on human consciousness—synonymous with statistical regularity, and based on the mental operation called induction and the search for the necessary conditions—which everybody in the known world does, we are acting in a faithless way. Yet, this whole series of things built on human consciousness and induction and the search for necessary conditions seems to be a very reasonable approach to the living of life. In fact, one might say that without employing such things you would be quite foolish. The question is asked: How will an individual take care of himself during the years following his retirement? What are the necessary conditions for his survival? And yet the Lord has said to us in Mt. 6, “do not worry about what you will eat or wear, I will give you all those things, only pursue me.” Now what He meant was in order to pursue righteousness one must pursue the consciousness of the Creator to the exclusion of the world picture provided by human consciousness. Now certainly in terms of church growth the idea of the senses producing a world picture is very much in place. The statistical regularity that is produced in the writings of George Barna are a clear illustration of our dependence on human consciousness and the whole mental apparatus that goes with it, such as induction. Obviously the idea is if we can isolate all of these cases wherein churches grow, statistically speaking, like the Willow Creek church in Chicago, and apply those same tactics in other like cases then other churches will experience similar growth. Those are the ideas that are built into this worldly conception that we have and almost automatically use to focus in on the material world. This world picture is provided by human consciousness and not God. This is the same thing that occurred in Genesis chapter three when Eve looked at the fruit and said “well this fruit that has been forbidden looks like all the other fruit in this garden. And the tree from which it came does not look that much different from all the other trees, so she says statistically speaking this one looks like all of the rest.” Thus, she took those cases and mapped them onto this case. This, therefore, was certainly an act of human induction. This is the profile of how faithlessness operates. And it works systemically through the whole of human life and human experience.

As we focus on the material universe the biblical instructions God has given man amount to this: We are not to depend on the world picture provided to us by human consciousness and the sensorium, but we are to rely exclusively on the consciousness of the Creator since His consciousness has been revealed to us.

It could be said that the consciousness of the Creator could take two forms. In order for us to be aware of it we must have it revealed to us. He has done this through the writing of the Old Testament and the New Testament. And He does it by working his will out in our lives, by setting up circumstances and directing our lives however He chooses to do so. So the consciousness of the Creator corresponds to revelation. Revelation is made available to the human race. It is through the revelation, which is the consciousness of the Creator, that we are able to comprehend the material universe. This constitutes nothing more or less than a tremendous shift in world pictures. We are suggesting that the most valid and the only authoritative, authentic and truthful world picture comes through the consciousness of the Creator, not through human consciousness. There was a generalization that came from the Protestant Reformation that said that human consciousness as aided by Scripture can come to an adequate understanding of the material universe. This makes a lot of sense to contemporary people, but that is very different than saying that human consciousness must be subordinated to the consciousness of the Creator. The Protestant Reformation generalization that was provided, a belief that we have always held onto, stated unequivocally that we have a complete picture of how the universe operates.

Is this true? Does the human consciousness factor give us the true world picture? Of course when you say that human consciousness as aided by Scripture will give us a picture, we are creating and handing the Bible a specific role that we want it to play, we are forcing it into a mold. This certainly, we must agree, is not what the Bible proports to be or proports to do. The consciousness of the Creator is the only invariable structure in the universe. Pharaoh is going to learn this fact when a Jew named Moses coming from Mount Sinai out of the desert into the environs of the Egyptian empire, marches up to Pharaoh and says “let my people go.” This indeed is a revelation to him but in an audible, linguistic form. It is a form of the consciousness of the Creator. And he will learn the hard way that the consciousness of the Creator is the only invariant structure in the universe. He will learn this at the cost of his empire. At one point after the plagues his own retinue will say “are you not yet aware that Egypt is ruined.” All of this was built upon the imposition of the consciousness of the Creator.

Revelation clearly teaches the case for direct causation. Now that is very different than statistical regularity. It is very different from trying to figure out what the necessary conditions would be for certain events to occur. There is no question that the Bible teaches direct causation. Let us pick up a few illustration to make the case most obvious.

In Genesis 1 the universe is brought into being by the direct causation of God. He spoke and the world existed. Later on when man is created, he is the direct effect of God. Or we may state in another way: man is the direct causation of the consciousness of the Creator. What is the absolute cause of everything? It is the consciousness of the Creator of the universe. In like manner, when the flood comes, it is brought about by the direct causation of God. He is in the driver’s seat in all human affairs!
Furthermore, when Abraham is selected to bless all nations, it is brought about by the direct causation of God. The confusion of language at the tower of Babel, before the call of Abraham, occurred because of the consciousness of the Creator, the direct causation that He has over the material universe.

As one reads throughout the prophets there are such passages as Jeremiah 14 and other passages that are very salient that will say that God is in moment by moment control of the physical universe. One sees Him bringing great judgments on places like Sodom and Gomorrah. How is it that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed if it was not due to the consciousness of the Creator?
Now when did the fact or the idea of direct causation end? As a result of that belief comes our dependence on our senses as the source that provides our world picture. Notice then that it is not Scripture but man himself. In Matt. 6 when the Messiah commands the believer not to worry about what he will eat or wear, and promises that He will give him all of these things—is He not saying that his material welfare, his ability to live and continue here in this world, is going to be an effect of the direct causation of God, a direct result of the consciousness of the Creator. In the marvelous manifestations of the miraculous that Jesus did, is He not saying, “do you understand that in terms of the material world it is functioning by the direct causation of God?” Because of our reading of the Bible through our sense experience, we have lost our conception of direct causation. Now we tend to lean in favor of statistical regularity. We think in terms of absolute natural law. We have conjured up natural law because we see a kind of regularity that can be given a mathematical form. In other words, it can be mathematisized. Moreover, nature can be mathematisized. Which, by the way, is one of the elements in the scientific revelation that was supposed to have taken place in the sixteenth century. Statistical regularity, which is built upon human consciousness of the material world, seems to say that it has the correct and accurate world picture and the Bible does not. At least it does not for the contemporary world in which we live. In James 5, when the brother of Jesus writes, “If any of you is in trouble? He should pray—because his world is under the direct causation of God. Is any one of you in trouble? He should pray—because his bodily process are under the direct causation of the consciousness of the Creator.” He would also say “are any of you enjoying good things? He tells those who are to give thanks to God because that is the result of the direct causation of the consciousness of the Creator.

Let us recognize that we have taken certain conceptions that have been handed to us by the civilization in which we live. This is not unique to western civilization since this is how the world has always operated. We have been operating by the dictates of human consciousness and this means that we have had to experience some kind of diminution of Scripture. And, of course, the only reason why Scripture is valid is because it is a revelation. A revelation of “what” we must ask ourselves? It is a revelation of the consciousness of the Creator. The Bible clearly represents a revealed knowledge and a superior way of knowing. It is a mental operation that is built upon revelation and is called deduction.

Deduction is when one begins with a premise that is unquestioned and one applies it to all other cases that may come up for consideration, review or appraisal. That it is the very opposite, however, of induction. One can see that even the very way in which our intelligence operates is affected by the faith experience. Deduction means that one takes what God says and applies it to all subsequent cases of human experience. Now if one acts inductively he has done just the reverse. Of course induction can only be based upon human experience. In other words, it ultimately can only be built upon human consciousness and it’s view of the universe. Biblical deduction is how we have been asked to live. Everything in the Old Testament and the New Testament reaffirms time after time that this is true. However we in the contemporary church operate according to induction. The question of whether or not human consciousness gives us a valid world picture never comes up for review. It is as if we have taken this for granted that God has created human consciousness, He has given us the ability to get a grasp on the material world that surrounds us, we can put together certain patterns in our thinking which merge into statistical regularity, we can then act on induction and apply that to our cases. The first thing that occurs to us when illness strikes or when some kind of financial reversal occurs is to act inductively. “We are going to go down the drain financially” because whenever certain situations like this develop that is what the indicated end always is, and we apply it to our circumstance. We ask always the central questions “what are the necessary conditions?”

Now deduction does not ask these questions. It is not even concerned with these questions because it’s whole vision of the material universe is absolutely different than what human consciousness is able to provide. What does the consciousness of the Creator, now converted into revelation, deduce? If Adam and Eve, in Genesis 3, had operated on the consciousness of the Creator and had said: “There is a part of the material universe that we cannot understand. The tree, after all, is forbidden.” However, human consciousness says that the forbidden tree looks like all the other trees. The fruit on it looks as good as the fruit on some of these other trees. Then we’ll induct and we’ll eat and we’ll get the corresponding and very unfavorable results that we desire. If they had acted deductively, they would have said to the serpent: “Our consciousness of that tree is not sufficient to tell us everything we need to know. In fact it can even lie to us. It can deceive us. We are going to act deductively. The basis for our deduction is the revealed consciousness of the Creator.” Now since material experience boils down to one or the other consciousness, either human consciousness or the consciousness of God, man is going to have to make a faith exercise. We are going to operate on the consciousness of the Creator and believe that His consciousness gives us a complete and thorough going, adequate and truthful world picture. We are going to operate on His words and deduct from what He has to say and map it onto all subsequent cases. They should have said: “Deductively speaking the Lord has forbidden us to eat of that tree, indeed He has given us content about the nature of the exercise of eating of the fruit of the tree. So what we are going to do is take meaning that and map it onto this situation and reject the temptation. That is how we deal with temptation, by deduction.

Throughout the history of Israel, especially in the wilderness, their whole experience from the Exodus forward to when the conquest begins, is one built on induction. Biblical deduction becomes the base of the Christian life if and only if one is convinced that the consciousness of the Creator does provides a reliable world picture. I’m going to make the suggestion that in most of our churches people believe that the world picture is developed primarily on the bases of human consciousness. This is where physics comes from, this is where all of the hard sciences have developed, this is where we place technology and there is no real reason to doubt it. This has to have some limiting effect on the role of Scripture. Scripture is pushed further and further away. Which means that the consciousness of the Creator is no longer seen as a viable source of the world picture.

The ideas about which we are talking are generalizations. A generalization is not one simply because we pronounce it as one, but rather because it is generated by the text. What does this infer then about the case for necessary conditions? Well let’s ask the Bible a few questions.

What are the necessary conditions for the overthrow of the Egyptian empire in the days of the Exodus? The answer, biblically speaking, is that there are no necessary conditions for the Egyptian empire to be destroyed at the zenith of its power and influence with all of it’s military apparatus in tack. Add to the description all of it’s vast holdings and wealth. There are then, is it not true, no necessary conditions? The only thing that has to happen is that the consciousness of the Creator has to speak and these things come unwound. What are the necessary conditions for the Red Sea to open? Biblical deduction does not ask that question since it already has the answer—there are no necessary conditions.

We have entertained, from time to time, some of the arguments that have been made by our liberal friends concerning these one time non-repeatable events. They may say about the Exodus that the Israelites crossed at a very shallow end of the Red Sea where the wind consistently blows and where there is almost a natural land bridge that would appear at certain times of the year because the wind would force the waters to recede. They come to that conclusion, of course, because they cannot imagine that there are no necessary conditions for this many millions of people to cross the Red Sea. We come to the conclusion—biblical deduction comes to the conclusion—that there are no necessary conditions. The consciousness of the Creator, and only Him, brings these things about. What are the necessary conditions for one and a half to two and a half million Israelites to survive in a desert-like environment, without abundant wells and without being able to have immediate provisions? When they came out of Egypt they had all of their mouths to feed, the soldiers numbered more than 600 thousand alone and then the elderly, the women, the children and their flocks. They all had to eat and they all certainly needed water. How did they do that? What were the necessary conditions? The biblical mind says: “There are no necessary conditions.”
And one always sees some faithful people in Israel who say that there are no necessary conditions. When Joshua and Caleb, members of the twelve man recon mission, went into the land of the Amorites and came back they had to come to a conclusion concerning the Lord’s charge of taking the land. They, in essence, had to appeal to and remember God’s words or to the picture given to them by their sensorium. The ten faithless spies made their report based upon the sensorium and the people believed them. In other words, the ten faithless spies declared that the necessary conditions were not in place. Thus, they would have to wait until the necessary conditions were in place or go back to Egypt. The inability to supply the necessary conditions, of course, was a cause of great concern and consternation to them. The ten spies, the leaders of the nation, consequently stir up this grand furor in the hearts and the minds of the people. So the whole of the Israelite camp is in turmoil, wailing and weeping and anxiety has spread, panic has set in throughout the camp. Joshua and Caleb run forward announcing “Oh no! You must understand that with God there are no necessary conditions for the walls of Jericho to come down, or for us to cross the Jordan, or for us to discompart the Amorite peoples.” Notice that Caleb and Joshua were called faithful. And they were the only ones allowed to see the land. The other 600 thousand plus soldiers, and that is apparently the ratio, were not allowed to see the land of promise. Only Joshua and Caleb. Why? Because they acted on the basis of the consciousness of the Creator.

Now I ask the question: Should we today dispense with elements associated with necessary conditions and opt for this unique and faithful mental and spiritual posture called biblical deduction? We can’t do that unless we have faith that the revelation is the consciousness of the Creator. Furthermore, we must believe that the consciousness of the Creator is the direct cause of everything in the universe. If we do that then of course we are going to be able to adequately deal with a lot of the influences that are surrounding us today. We in the churches of Christ generally take the position without much question that human consciousness is the basis upon which we must begin our investigations. This is true also of those that we might place within the camp of the postmodern. It must be understood that the universe as far as we are concerned will collapse into one or the other consciousness. It will either collapse into the consciousness of God or the consciousness of man. If we choose the former it will present to us a world picture that we will believe and the substance by which we will generalize to the whole of life. Or it will boil down to a world picture that is produced by human consciousness and the sensorium.

Every time Israel made a tragic mistake they did so on the basis of human consciousness. The case, for instance in 1 Samuel 8, where they come to Samuel and ask him for a king because statistical regularity says if were are like the other nations around us we will have some semblance of protection against these raiders that come in here upon occasion. The reason why they were so often turned over to the hands of their enemies was because the consciousness of the Creator put them in that condition. He warned them when they were at Gigal, He warned them again at Mount Ebal and Mount Gerazim: “I put before you this day blessings and cursings.” Which would the people choose? Blessings come by reliance on the consciousness of the Creator. That is what the Scripture is: the consciousness of the Creator revealed in words.

But cursings always follow a dependence upon and a disposition of faith toward human consciousness. Man, however, cannot trust these things. That has a lot of significance for what we call evangelism. If we simply reduce the gospel to a number of practices or a number of doctrines and do not present the Scripture and the gospel as the manifestation of the consciousness of the Creator then we have made revelation something that it never was.

Therefore, inherent in anyone’s conversion is a removal of dependence on human consciousness to a complete dependence on the consciousness of God. Have we really converted anyone? Has anyone’s soul ultimately been saved when no faith, no faithfulness has been produced, nor the prospect of faith in the offing? It is not there because human consciousness has never been questioned. This is because the role of Scripture has been delimited.