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Concerning faith and sight:
Being made in the "image of God"

by
Dean Gotcher

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Hebrews 11:1
"So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God." Romans 10:17
"But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him." Hebrews 11:6
"For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God; not of works, lest any man should boast." Ephesians. 2:8, 9
"For we walk by faith, not by sight:"  II Corinthians 5:7

"For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world." "If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him."  1 John 2:16, 15
"Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man: But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death." James 1:13-15
 "From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not. Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts." James 4:1-3

 "For we dare not make ourselves of the number, or compare ourselves with some that commend themselves: but they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise." II Corinthians 10:12
''And he said unto them, Ye are they which justify yourselves before men; but God knoweth your hearts: for that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God." Luke 16: 15
"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" Jeremiah 17:9
"Every one that is proud in heart is an abomination to the LORD: though hand join in hand, he shall not be unpunished." Proverbs 16:5

"No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him." John 1:18
"I and my Father are one." John 10:30
"he that hath seen me hath seen the Father;" John 14:9

"Then answered Jesus and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise." "I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is just; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me." "For I have not spoken of myself; but the Father which sent me, he gave me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak. And I know that his commandment is life everlasting: whatsoever I speak therefore, even as the Father said unto me, so I speak." John 5:19, 30; 12:47-50
"Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;" 2 Corinthians 10:5 7

Karl Marx: "Science is only genuine science when it proceeds from sense experience, in the two forms of sense perception and sensuous need, that is, only when it proceeds from Nature." (Karl Marx MEGA I/3)

Karl Marx: "Once the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must itself be annihilated [vernichtet] theoretically and practically." (Karl Marx, Theses On Feuerbach #4)

Sigmund Freud: "'It is not really a decisive matter whether one has killed one's father or abstained from the deed,' if the function of the conflict and its consequences are the same." (Sigmund Freud in Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization)
"Freud's finest insights are incurably 'dialectical.'" (Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History)

"Part of the dialectics of the process of winning independence from parental authority lies in using the extrafamilial peer group as a foil to parental authority, particularly in the period of adolescence." (Bradford, Gibb, Benne, T-Group Theory and Laboratory Method: Innovation in Re-education)
"In the dialogic relation of recognizing oneself in the other, they experience the common ground of their existence." (Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge & Human Interest, Chapter Three: The Idea of the Theory of Knowledge as Social Theory

"The entry into Freud cannot avoid being a plunge into a strange world and a strange language―a world of sick men, ....It is a shattering experience for anyone seriously committed to the Western traditions of morality and rationality to take a steadfast, unflinching look at what Freud has to say. To experience Freud is to partake a second time of the forbidden fruit; and this book cannot without sinning communicate that experience to the reader." "Our real choice is between holy and unholy madness: open your eyes and look around you―madness is in the saddle anyhow." "It is possible to be mad and to be unblest, but it is not possible to get the blessing without the madness; it is not possible to get the illuminations without the derangement," "I wagered my intellectual life on the idea of finding in Freud what was missing in Marx." (Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History)

Georg Hegel: "The child, contrary to appearance, is the absolute, the rationality of the relationship; he is what is enduring and everlasting, the totality which produces itself once again as such [as he 'liberates' his "self" from the father's commands, rules, facts, and truth, i.e., as he becomes as he was before the father's first command, rule, fact, and truth, i.e., carnal, i.e., of the world only, negating the "guilty conscience" for doing wrong in the process]." (George Hegel, System of Ethical Life)

"Authoritarian submission was conceived of as a very general attitude that would be evoked in relation to a variety of authority figures—parents, older people, leaders, supernatural power, and so forth." "God is conceived more directly after a parental image and thus as a source of support and as a guiding and sometimes punishing authority." "An attitude of complete submissiveness toward ‘supernatural forces' and a readiness to accept the essential incomprehensibility of ‘many important things' strongly suggest the persistence in the individual of infantile attitudes toward the parents, that is to say, of authoritarian submission in a very pure form." "The conception of the ideal family situation for the child: 1) uncritical obedience to the father and elders, 2) pressures directed unilaterally from above to below, 3) inhibition of spontaneity and 4) emphasis on conformity to externally imposed values." "The power—relationship between the parents, the domination of the subject's family by the father or by the mother, and their relative dominance in specific areas of life also seemed of importance for our problem." (Theodor Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality)

 "I have found whenever I ran across authoritarian students that the best thing for me to do was to break their backs immediately." "The correct thing to do with authoritarians is to take them realistically for the bastards they are and then behave toward them as if they were bastards." (Abraham Maslow, Maslow on Management)

 "The world cannot hate you; but me it hateth, because I testify of it, that the works thereof are evil." John 7:7
"And ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake: but he that endureth to the end shall be saved." Mathew 10:22

"Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." John 14:6
"Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved." Acts 4:12
"For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother." Matthew 12:50
"And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven." Matthew 23:9
"Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my father which is in heaven." Matthew 7:21

"For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God." John 3:17-18
"Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven. Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that " Matthew 10:32-39

"No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon." Luke 16:13
"Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be." Romans 8:7
"Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God?" James 4:1-4

"Freud and Hegel are, like Marx, compelled to postulate external domination and its assertion by force in order to explain repression." "According to Freud, the ultimate essence of our being is erotic, and demands activity according to the pleasure-principle. The foundation on which the man of the future will be built is already there, in the repressed unconscious; the foundation has to be recovered." "In the words of Thoreau: 'We need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life. Our present senses are but rudiments of what they are destined to become.'" "To experience Freud is to partake a second time of the forbidden fruit;" "Parental discipline, religious denunciation of bodily pleasure, . . . have all left man overly docile, but secretly in his unconscious unconvinced, and therefore neurotic." (Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History)

"If the guilt accumulated in the civilized domination of man by man can ever be redeemed by freedom, then the 'original sin' must be committed again: 'We must again eat from the tree of knowledge in order to fall back into the state of innocence.'" (Herbart Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A philosophical inquiry into Freud)

"But Brown believed that the payoff was worth the price of sin—namely, that alienation would be overcome, and the return of the repressed completed, rendering problems of sin permanently moot. Life Against Death established Brown, along with his colleague and friend Herbert Marcuse, and later Charles Reich, as an intellectual leader of the New Left …. a Marxist mode of Freudian analysis." (Mike Connor remarks on Norman O. Brown at Brown's funeral, March 23-30, 2005 issue of Metro Santa Cruz)

To "purge [man] of sin with all the aids of the dialectics, therefore, is to rob him of true salvation, of his eternal destiny." (Rene Fulop-Miller, The Power and Secrets of the Jesuits, p.468)

"Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others." Ephesians 2:2, 3
"and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ." 1 John 1:3

It was Karl Marx's hope that man would only see himself as he is (through dialectic 'reasoning,' 'justifying' himself "before men"), that man would re-create himself in his own image, evaluating the world according to his own "human nature," measuring himself according to his own feelings and thoughts (according to his own "sensuous needs," "sense perception," and "sense experience," "only according to nature"), that "... the eye becomes the human eye, the ear the human ear." (Karl Marx)

But God declares that "the imagination of men's heart," the image that man has of himself, evaluating himself (and God) according to his own 'reasoning' abilities, is abomination. We are made in the image of God.  What does that mean?  That we can evaluate.  We either evaluate what we see by God's Word (by faith) or we evaluate God's Word by what we see (by sight), according to our "human eyes" and our "human ears," as the woman did (with Adam following) in God's garden in Eden (Genesis 3:1-6).  "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!" Isaiah 5: 20, 21

no man has seen

"And Jesus said, For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind.  And some of the Pharisees which were with him heard these words, and said unto him, Are we blind also?  Jesus said unto them, If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth."   John 9:39-41  If we evaluate God and His word from our sight, we are blind and continue in our sin, trusting in our flesh.  But if we confess that we are blind, not able to evaluate ourselves and the world around us apart from God's word, putting our faith in God and His Word, then we can see ourselves and the world as God sees us and the world.  It is therefore, in Christ alone that we gain sight and can evaluate ourselves as God evaluates us and "have no sin," being redeemed, made alive in Him, according to His righteousness, no longer dead according to the works (praxis) of our flesh, living by sight.

If we continue to evaluate the ourselves and the world we live in according to our sight (according to "human reasoning"), continuing to 'justify' our carnal heart over and against the Word of God, then we remain in our sin.  "Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes: but know thou, that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment. Therefore remove sorrow from thy heart, and put away evil from thy flesh: for childhood and youth are vanity." Ecclesiastes 11:9, 10

"For the heart of this people is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes have they closed; lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them."  Acts 28:27

Luther spoke of education in his day, that unless the school insistently preach and teach the Word of God they become wide gates to hell, warning that "... they teach not Christ but human reasoning. . .  Woe to these lost and dreadful men of Sodom and Gomorrah!" "Miserable Christians, whose words and faith still depend on the interpretations of men and who expect clarification from them!  This is frivolous and ungodly.  The Scriptures are common to all, and are clear enough in respect to what is necessary for salvation and are also obscure enough for inquiring minds. . . let us reject the word of man."   (Martin Luther, Luther's Works)

"Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.  Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh, despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities." Jude 7, 8

If you don't start with righteousness (God and His Word) as being the issue of life, you can not see above the fray of the sensuous 'moment' (your carnal nature), you can not know where you are and therefore turn away from where you are going―in bondage to the pleasures of this life going into eternal damnation.  Seven billion sinners sinning, does not make sin 'right.'  Only in Christ is righteousness and true life found.  It is only in Him alone, in His righteousness, 'redeeming' us from judgment and eternal death and 'reconciling' us to the Father, that the issue of life resides.

In your praxis of defending ('justifying') your bondage to the "enjoyment" of this life you will attack and destroy righteousness.  Satan will keep you busy pursuing and defending the "enjoyment" of this life (having "pleasure in unrighteousness"), even doing so in "the name of Lord," only to use you for his Genesis 3:1-6 project, the negation of righteousness from the face of the earth (personally and socially) so that all men might remain deceived, "taking pleasure" in deceiving one another (evaluating themselves and the world through "human nature") under his influence and control, and remain condemned by God for their unrighteous praxis in this life.  Not believing in the truth, not following after that righteousness which is only imputed by Christ to men of faith in Him, but rather believing in a lie, following after their own sensuousness and 'reasoning' abilities, dialectical man ('justifying' himself before himself, measuring himself with himself) will spend eternity in the "life" to come, with the great deceiver, in hell―which will not be eternal "life" spent in enjoyment and pleasure but will instead be eternal "life" spent in torment and pain―because they "believed not the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness."  I encourage you to trust in the Lord with all your heart, if you are not already doing so, and stop leaning to your own (sensuous) understanding, evaluating yourself according to your own "human nature" and not according to the Word of God.  (Proverbs 3:5)

In the consensus process man evaluates and judges himself according to the flesh (according to his own sensuousness), negating righteousness as the measuring stick for judging his thoughts and his actions.  We need to concern ourselves with how God evaluates us (sees us), judging us according to His Word and Spirit, not how man' sees us, judging us according to the flesh, since God is the one determining where we will spend eternity, not man. "But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away."  Isaiah 64:6    "And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith:"  Philippians 3:9  The law only exposes mans vanity and wickedness, God's law revealing man as being sensual, temporal, and therefore vain, with man either turning to law, to 'justifying' himself by works, or rejecting law, 'justifying' his flesh as "good," i.e. if it feels good it is "good," all for personal gain, i.e. for the "lust" of pleasure and/or "the approval of men," or repenting of his sins, turning to God, i.e., the Father, and his son Jesus Christ for salvation, that he might inherit eternal life.

© Institution for Authority Research, Dean Gotcher 2012-2015, 2017