IN THE WORDS OF JESUS–Part 171

YES, HE is Talking to YOU! (continued)

Love is the Fulfilling of the Law

We spent much time yesterday on the accounts in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke regarding the questioning of the Master by the disciples of John and we followed this up by trying to get a clear understanding of our idea that the Baptist knew, at every stage of his journey, what his purpose was and what his relationship to the Master was. It is possible that he even knew the relative timing of his demise. We know from the gospel stories of John’s stamina, his righteousness, his commitment and his loyalty. His unswerving dedication to his mission and his recognition of the Master should be encouragement to all who wish to call themselves disciples of the Lord. Yet in all of this John the Baptist found within himself a point of doubt, a time of uncertainty. This is not unlike the doubt and the uncertainty that plague all who are reaching out to the unseen and to that which is unknown except by Faith. It is in talking about a subject such as this that one can get a glimpse of the reality of Faith, a subject that we have spent much time on. When we consider Faith in this context, we can remove it from the world of things and the notions of parts of the church that relegate Faith to believing for a thing to happen or a thing to come our way. In this context is the True Faith that is written about in the bible.

Faith can of course come to us on many levels of realization and there are many in the church that have developed extreme Faith in what it is that they believe and in this idea we should see that Faith alone does not make a thing right. We can say that there are men of Faith in every one of the differing denominations and sects of Christianity and men of Faith in every other religion as well. Each of them sees the world through their own eyes and firmly believes that they are right. So what more does it take than Faith?

This is of course a hard question to answer and a difficult subject to discuss as there is no guidance other than those ideas on Faith that bring one to his point of unswerving belief; unswerving whether the object of one’s belief is right or not. This is the nature of the conscious mind of man and this is the reason for the variety of theologies and philosophies; without the steady strength and power of the Christ Within flowing through our consciousness personalities there is naught by glamour and illusion. We must remember here that all of this, like so much else in Life, is a matter of degree. We should again see here that there is a range of values, from a man conscious only of his carnal nature and its life to the man that is fully a Son of God, a disciple of the Christ and in His Presence. The latter is of course the goal for all who walk the Earth and it is the prize of prizes that is only found when we reach the Kingdom of God. For all of us who are still short of this goal we can only see a glimmer of the Light from our Souls which we, as men in conscious form, then manipulate to fit our own specific personality and belief system. This is the illusion; that we believe that what we see is the Way, the Truth and the Life. And this is the glamour, that we see what we are and what we believe as being of the utmost importance and the only right perception.

To our question of what more does it take than Faith we can answer that the whole of the Master’s words and the essence of our entire blog contain the reality of what is required of us in order that we can come to that high and exalted place where we are accounted worthy. Most all of the Master’s teachings are guideposts designed to show us the way. In some there are the hidden messages that we have been trying to discern through these posts but in many the truth is as plain as can possibly be yet we cannot, because of our Faith to believe only what we choose to believe, see it at all clearly. Before we continue with John’s doubts, let us look briefly at some of the clearer messages from the Master that so many routinely ignore.

• “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself“. (Mark 12:31) This is universal GoodWill.
• “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them” (Matthew 7:12)
• “Therefore take no thought , saying , What shall we eat ? or, What shall we drink ? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? …….But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow……” (Matthew 6:31, 33-34)
• “Whosoever shall not receive the kingdomof God as a little child, he shall not enter therein” (Mark 10:15).
• “And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God! And the disciples were astonishedat his words. But Jesus answereth again, and saith unto them, Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God!” (Mark 10:23-24).
• “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” (Matthew 10:37).

The above are but a few of the sayings of the Master which are clear enough for most all to understand. From a worldly perspective these are most difficult things to accomplish and it is in this context that we, as men, find our ways around His sayings. We have created, from the very beginning, a veil if illusion around His very pointed sayings creating ways to free ourselves from the burdens of proper understanding. We are men in this world and we are generally overcome by it, regardless of what we would like to believe is true. This is the nature of illusion; that we build for ourselves, individually and in group formation, a reality that works for us and our ‘salvation’. And this is the nature of glamour, that we become so embedded in our world of illusion that we not only believe it but we believe that our way in the right an sometimes, the only way. Of course nothing exists in a vacuum and the ideas that we have are fed by world ideas of the same or similar nature and the only way to break out of this in through the power of the Christ Within, the flow of Soul Light into our conscious personalities.

These ideas of illusion and glamour are not limited to our spiritual lives; these things are true in most every walk of life. In every philosophical and psychological and in every political arena. They are the effects on the human mind of the emotional and mental forces and energies prevalent at any given time and these, like all else in this manifested universe, are steadily evolving. The very nature of all of the things mentioned above are ever changing and evolving over time and even a cursory look at the history of each will show this to be true. And, as this evolution progresses, the whole of humanity grows ever more spiritual and capable of more and more of the Light from above and more and more men are able to step out onto the Path of discipleship. This may not be as apparent to us all for as this is happening the human race is at the same time expanding and there is yet much diversity along racial and religious lines that we cannot understand. Look at the bible history that we discuss in these posts as an example of change, look a the people in Abraham’s time and compare those in Moses and those in the era of the Kings and then the captivity and the time of Christ; then look at our dark ages and middle ages and the even our modern era. All this is marked by an ever growing population, varying degrees of superstition giving way to religion, varying plots of world domination, colonization, great wars and eventuating in today’s freedoms which are marked by an unprecedented global economy and global cooperation.

While there is a Christian hatred for the word evolution, there is a reality to it and no one can escape its effects; it is only because one sees his Life as this life in form and consciousness that evolution becomes hard to understand and to reconcile against scripture. However, when one sees his Life as the Life that is Spirit and that this form is merely a vehicle for expression of Life on this Earth, he can take a great step in understanding. The physical body and its corresponding emotional and mental apparatus are steadily evolving through the races and through time so as to afford to the Soul an ever more useful form capable of evermore Spiritual expression. Did the human form evolve from the ape and the prehistoric man? science tell us so and it is likely true but this is of no importance because we are not the body, we are the Spirit and we would have, if such be the case, little to do with the body we use other that its being a vehicle for consciousness in form. Now this does not work at all with the notions of Adam and Eve nor with the seven day creation theories but if we can but drop the superstitions and realize that these words were written many thousands of years ago for a people who could only understand beginnings and creation in the way it was written to them, we can come a long way toward proper understanding. And we know, from reading the beginnings of the Old Testament, that these were a very superstitious and a very primitive and brutal people, especially by our standards.

A great Christian writer from the 19th Century, Alexander Maclaren, starts off his seventeen volume set* saying this about the book of Genesis in his first entry therein called “The Vision of Creation”. This is rather lengthy but can give us the view of a very respected Christian’s thoughts as well as shine a light on some modicum of reality.

We are not to look to Genesis for a scientific cosmogony, and are not to be disturbed by physicists’ criticisms on it as such. Its purpose is quite another, and far more important; namely, to imprint deep and ineffaceable the conviction that the one God created all things. Nor must it be forgotten that this vision of creation was given to people ignorant of natural science, and prone to fall back into surrounding idolatry. The comparison of the creation narratives in Genesis with the cuneiform tablets, with which they evidently are most closely connected, has for its most important result the demonstration of the infinite elevation above their monstrosities and puerilities, of this solemn, steadfast attribution of the creative act to the one God. Here we can only draw out in brief the main points which the narrative brings into prominence.

1. The revelation which it gives is the truth, obscured to all other men when it was given, that one God ‘in the beginning created the heaven and the earth.’ That solemn utterance is the keynote of the whole. The rest but expands it. It was a challenge and a denial for all the beliefs of the nations, the truth of which Israel was the champion and missionary. It swept the heavens and earth clear of the crowd of gods, and showed the One enthroned above, and operative in, all things. We can scarcely estimate the grandeur, the emancipating power, the all-uniting force, of that utterance. It is a worn commonplace to us. It was a strange, thrilling novelty when it was written at the head of this narrative. _Then_ it was in sharp opposition to beliefs that have long been dead to us; but it is still a protest against some living errors. Physical science has not spoken the final word when it has shown us how things came to be as they are. There remains the deeper question, What, or who, originated and guided the processes? And the only answer is the ancient declaration, ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’
2. The record is as emphatic and as unique in its teaching as to the mode of creation: ‘God said … and it was so.’ That lifts us above all the poor childish myths of the nations, some of them disgusting, many of them absurd, all of them unworthy. There was no other agency than the putting forth of the divine will. The speech of God is but a symbol of the flashing forth of His will. To us Christians the antique phrase suggests a fulness of meaning not inherent in it, for we have learned to believe that ‘all things were made by Him’ whose name is ‘The Word of God’; but, apart from that, the representation here is sublime. ‘He spake, and it was done’; that is the sign- manual of Deity.
3. The completeness of creation is emphasised. We note, not only the recurrent ‘and it was so,’ which declares the perfect correspondence of the result with the divine intention, but also the recurring ‘God saw that it was good.’ His ideals are always realised. The divine artist never finds that the embodiment of His thought falls short of His thought. ‘What act is all its thought had been? What will but felt the fleshly screen? But He has no hindrances nor incompletenesses in His creative work, and the very sabbath rest with which the narrative closes symbolises, not His need of repose, but His perfect accomplishment of His purpose. God ceases from His works because ‘the works were finished,’ and He saw that all was very good.
4. The progressiveness of the creative process is brought into strong relief. The work of the first four days is the preparation of the dwelling-place for the living creatures who are afterwards created to inhabit it. How far the details of these days’ work coincide with the order as science has made it out, we are not careful to ask here. The primeval chaos, the separation of the waters above from the waters beneath, the emergence of the land, the beginning of vegetation there, the shining out of the sun as the dense mists cleared, all find confirmation even in modern theories of evolution. But the intention of the whole is much rather to teach that, though the simple utterance of the divine will was the agent of creation, the manner of it was not a sudden calling of the world, as men know it, into being, but majestic, slow advance by stages, each of which rested on the preceding. To apply the old distinction between justification and sanctification, creation was a work, not an act. The Divine Workman, who is always patient, worked slowly then as He does now. Not at a leap, but by deliberate steps, the divine ideal attains realisation.
5. The creation of living creatures on the fourth and fifth days is so arranged as to lead up to the creation of man as the climax. On the fifth day sea and air are peopled, and their denizens ‘blessed,’ for the equal divine love holds every living thing to its heart. On the sixth day the earth is replenished with living creatures. Then, last of all, comes man, the apex of creation. Obviously the purpose of the whole is to concentrate the light on man; and it is a matter of no importance whether the narrative is correct according to zoology, or not. What it says is that God made all the universe, that He prepared the earth for the delight of living creatures, that the happy birds that soar and sing, and the dumb creatures that move through the paths of the seas, and the beasts of the earth, are all His creating, and that man is linked to them, being made on the same day as the latter, and by the same word, but that between man and them all there is a gulf, since he is made in the divine image. That image implies personality, the consciousness of self, the power to say ‘I,’ as well as purity. The transition from the work of the first four days to that of creating living things must have had a break. No theory has been able to bridge the chasm without admitting a divine act introducing the new element of life, and none has been able to bridge the gulf between the animal and human consciousness without admitting a divine act introducing ‘the image of God’ into the nature common to animal and man. Three facts as to humanity are thrown up into prominence: its possession of the image of God, the equality and eternal interdependence of the sexes, and the lordship over all creatures. Mark especially the remarkable wording of verse 27: ‘created He him male and female created He them.’ So ‘neither is the woman without the man, nor the man without the woman.’ Each is maimed apart from the other. Both stand side by side, on one level before God. The germ of the most ‘advanced’ doctrines of the relations of the sexes is hidden here.

From Alexander Maclaren (1826-1910); Expositions of  Holy Scripture–Project Gutenberg’s Expositions of Holy Scripture, by Alexander Maclaren–

*(originally more that thirty books but brought down to seventeen by incorporating multiple volumes into each, this set comprises more that 1500 sermons and lectures covering nearly every book in the Bible)

We will continue with our theme on the Baptist in the next post.

Note on the Quote of the Day