The Law of Opposites
by Norman Grubb

Having established the fact, that the only way by which God could create sons or "fellows" with whom He can live in fellowship, is by creating spirits with whom He can unite, we must search into another question. In this pre-destined union, what is our exact relationship? What do we contribute? What does He? How much of me? How much of Him? We touch a terrible subject here, for we probe into the existence of evil and hell. To do it, and to get some understanding of it, we must go right back into origins.

First, let us ask this question? What is self? Of what does it consist? How does it function? For our answer we must go to the first Self of all selves, the I AM, and of Him we are told that God is love. So love is the essence of self: Self is compounded of love. But what does love do? It is desire. It wants. It draws to itself. It must satisfy itself. It is continual hunger. This characteristic of self is found in the lowest to the highest of God’s creatures. It is the consuming hunger of fire (and God is a fire); it is the endless upreach of vegetation to the sun; it is the instinctive urges of the animals. Of God Himself it is written, "Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were created." I remember as a callow youth how those words startled me, and in my ignorance of the elemental meaning of self, I boldly said, "Then God Himself is selfish!" And I felt myself further confirmed in this when I read that Jesus "for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross." Not for God’s glory, not for our blessing, but for Himself; I said! Yes, self’s hungry love must be satisfied. It is self’s unchangeable nature which caused the Saviour to say, "Love thy neighbour as thou lovest thyself," to give a legitimate paraphrase: and Paul to write, "No man ever hated his own flesh, but nourisheth and cherisheth it."

But now we meet with a basic law of existence, which must take a little examination; a law which is obvious through Scripture and experience, and had its earliest mention in the solemn warning against eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, a plain hint that disobedience would bring the consciousness of two warring opposites in life, good and evil, instead of one harmonious experience of good alone. That law is the basic fact of nature that life can only be manifested through the rightful interaction of opposites; for basically everything has, and must have, its opposite.

Look at it this way. Everything in life is by its very nature duoform and we can only perceive or feel or know any-thing by the interactions of the two forms. There can be no yes, for instance, without an exactly equivalent no. If there is sweet, there must be bitter. If love, there must be hate; if male, female; if light, darkness. And so ad infinitum. Those direct opposites make life. If there were no such contrasts, nothing could be known or felt or done. How could we know light, except in contrast to darkness? How could we say yes, except in
distinction from no? How could there be movement, except in opposition to inertia? There could not be, for each pair of opposites are part of one whole: one can-not be without the other, when one is inactive so is the other. To say yes to one thing is to say no to its opposite. To move is to refuse to be still. If a thing tastes sweet, there has been a conquest over its innate bitterness.

The trouble is not that all things are pairs of opposites. Indeed not, for the pairs so make one whole that one cannot function without the other. One is the strength-giver of the other. But the whole trouble arises when what should be subservient dominates, so that the true nature of things is reversed. For in all pairs of opposites one is equivalent to the positive, and one to the negative, and the positive is meant to be in the ascendancy, and the negative to be the hidden servant. Take a pair like motion and inertia. All life is motion, but the very material which motion utilizes for its activities consists of inert objects. Motion consists of still things made to move. But supposing inertia could conquer and quench motion, supposing the atoms ceased to whirl or the earth to rotate! Sweet is the positive, bitter the negative, and sweetness is pleasant just because it can make bitter things palatable: the one is the raw material for the other. But supposing bitterness was permanently in the ascendant! Love must also have its reverse form of anti-love or hate of all that is the opposite of love, but supposing hate is in the ascendant! World history is the tragic commentary on that. Faith has its reverse form, its opposite is doubt. While it places confidence in one direction, it must as vigorously doubt and disbelieve in anything that diverts it from the object of its trust. But what times of desperation a soul goes through when doubt, the negative, is more in the forefront than faith, the positive. Indeed no man can live in doubt; he must in the end make his doubts his faith, if his personality is not to disintegrate.

So we see that opposites, contraries, are really the reverse sides of the same quality, an essential part of its one whole: but that in all the infinite numbers of pairs of opposites the positive exists to be in the forefront, in the ascendancy; its negative is its necessary and friendly background, its food and fuel, its servant and safeguard, its mate which gives form and manifestation to its offspring. Look again at light, for instance. Are not dark opaque sub-stances made beautiful by the shining of the light upon, in, and through them? Does not the marriage of light with darkness in this way bring into glorious manifestation the otherwise hidden marvels, and even the very existence of light? The light conquers the darkness, deprives it of its dominion, says "no" to it, but it is a friendly "no," for the existence of its opposite, the dark objects which in their mass appear to obstruct the free, pure, shining light, in actual fact gives light its foil and playmate, the raw material for its activities, the mother of its children, its "opposite sex," by interrelation with which, in light and shade, in transparency and solidity, all its wonders are manifested.

From this emerges that most important truth that opposites, the positive and negative sides of all qualities and powers in the universe, are not in their original enemies but friends, mates, one the complement of the other; but not as equals; they are meant to be as husband and wife in the Scriptures, the woman originally taken out of man, the man the head of the wife, the wife subject to the husband, yet in a mutual relationship of loving service to each other.

Now take this back to God Himself, the first Self. A self is immediately con-fronted with its opposite–others. Now what? Is the hungry self going to use others ruthlessly just for its own satisfaction? Or is it going to satisfy its basic. But what times of desperation a soul goes through when doubt, the negative, is more in the forefront than faith, the positive. Indeed no man can live in doubt; he must in the end make his doubts his faith, if his personality is not to disintegrate.
hunger by giving itself for others? Is it to be self-seeking or self-giving? Which of the two opposites predominates in this first Self of all selves? For life cannot be a manifested life without the interaction of these two opposites in the self. Self-love or other-love? The answer has been given from eternity and never was other-wise. God is love, expressed first in the love of His Son, begotten in His exact image: subsequently in the love of all His creatures: the eternal will to all goodness, from whom proceeds every good and perfect gift, and with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. God’s self-love finds its eternal satisfaction in other-love. The opposites are wedded, the negative self-love is the willing servant and mate to the positive other-love. Polarity is achieved and from it all loving activity. As the Father to the Son, so the Son to the Father, ever delighting to do His will, even to the cross; and from their union proceeding the Spirit of love to complete His love-plans for the universe.

So we see that the will and wisdom of Him who is from the beginning, that first Self, manifests the true interacting balance of all pairs of opposites. In Him they are "in temperature." Where then are the opposites in Him, that self-love would produce? Hate, darkness, evil? They are in the eternal No, a mere potentiality of the self, never to be in existence.

In His nature, who cannot even be tempted with evil, there is only pure other-love; but in the nature of self, in its implicit freedom, there is also the potentiality of self-love; and the eternal No of God to that potentiality is what gives form and manifestation to His positive lovingness. The negative No is the womb out of which is born the positive Yes. One is within the other, as when Paul says, "Death is swallowed up in victory": is not destroyed, but swallowed up: death dormant, merely potential, within life. So only the love is seen and known in God: only goodness, truth, and righteousness. That is all there is in God: "In Him is no darkness at all." The pairs of opposites are polarized: the positive has swallowed up the negative, yet the negative by its potential existence is the necessary, inseparable, manifestor, energizer, form-maker of the positive.

–The Liberating Secret