Monthly Archives: March 2012

Love is the Fulfilling of the Law

ON GOD; Part XLVIII

We have been discussing Third Aspect of God, the Holy Spirit, now for several days and at the outset it was our position that this is the least understood of all the Aspects because of the way He is presented in scripture. As we understand that the Three Aspects of the One God are essentially ONE and are only differentiated by the quality of their individual action it should not be a difficult stretch for us to see this in a reality in our minds albeit a theoretical and imaginary one. There are not words enough to express these ideas properly and so we find our understanding in the idea that God IS and God IS ONE and we get this from the repetition of the Old Testament commandment by the Master who says: “The first of all the commandments is, Hear , O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment” (Mark 12:29-30). This is rather straightforward and although some may believe that it is not intended in the fashion that we use it, it does agree with the rest of our understanding of the Nature of God; as least as much of that Nature as we can glimpse. We tie this together with another saying by the Lord to Moses regarding Who God IS; the Lord replies to Moses question of ” What is his name? what shall I say unto them?” by telling Him “I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you” (Exodus 3:13-14). From these, as well as from other confirming scripture we get the understanding that God IS and that God IS ONE.

Our understanding of this ONE GOD as the Father Aspect of the Trinity is introduced to us by the Master in many places and many ways in the gospels and this is an understanding that precedes the Master but is not spoken of in the Old Testament. This dialogue between the Jews and the Master says much on this; Jesus says: “Ye do the deeds of your father. Then said they to him, We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God. Jesus said unto them, If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me” (John 8:41-42). Again, this seems clear; that God is the Father of ALL. Moreover we can see in the Master’s words the relationship between God and heaven: “But I say unto you, Swear not at all; neither by heaven; for it is God’s throne” (Matthew 5:34) and then between the Father and Heaven as He teaches us to pray saying: “After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name” (Matthew 6:9). We should see in the above the One God is the Father who is at the Head of the Trinity but even more clearly we should see the entire Trinity as the One God as well and this is put forth for us by the Apostle John as he speaks of the Christ.

The Aspect that we call the Christ, the Son of God, is properly introduced to us in the prologue of the Gospel of John. John tells us that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God” (John 1:1-2). In the profundity of this opening statement is the reality of the Nature of the Son; as God, and as being with God and, when combined with the words of the Master: “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30), there should be an ever clear picture of the reality of the Christ as One With God and being God. We have posited that the Christ, the Son of God, is the manifestation of God in on His plane of being and this is only from the perspective of man. The Christ IS God and for us, as the Soul of All things and of man, is the only God that we can know; beyond the Soul, most all is incomprehensible to us. When however we come to the point of True discipleship, when the Soul, the Christ Within, is living through the form, we can begin to sense the stupendous and awesome Nature of the Father. We see here that from the perspective of the Son that we can look at these ideas with a bit of clarity which we frame in our chart which we repeat again below.

The Father IS God; Life, Existence; He is the ONE Boundless Immutable Principle; one Absolute Reality which, antecedes all manifested conditioned Being. It is beyond the range and reach of any human thought or expression**. To this we add from the Prologue that in His ONENESS is also the Son, the Christ, who comes forth from the Father as the manifestation of ALL things: cosmically as “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:3) and individually as the Master and as man: “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father” (John 16:28). Can we understand this from the concept of God Transcendent and God Immanent? GOD is beyond the range of our comprehension; He is ALL that IS. Christ is from GOD and is the manifestation and the cause of manifestation of ALL that is and, Christ is the LOVE, the cohesive Power that keeps ALL things; He is the manifested Life of GOD but this manifestation should not be viewed as what we see and we hear; He is not the physical, not the worlds and not the bodies, but the Life Force that allows them to exist, the Soul of All things within the Mind of GOD. We get a bit of insight into this from the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews. From the perspective of Faith, seen as our ability to understand (and in this we should see the KNOWING that we have spoken of in the past, that Wisdom from Above), he says “Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Hebrews 11:3). We should of course see in this the word as the idea of Christ who is the Creative Word of  God and we should see how the writer tells us that although this is beyond our comprehension we must believe it all by Faith; that is that all that we see is not made of things which we know are but of things that are invisible to us as men in the world. We understand today that ALL is energy and this is a thing that was not known by the men in the early church; in this understanding we have the better view of ALL as being the energy that subsists all that appears to be. This energy behind ALL things seen and unseen can be understood as the manifestation of All and therefore the Power of the Christ. We can view today particles of energy matter that could not even be imagined when these things were written and this should leave us to wonder at what point the physical becomes physical and leaves off being spiritual and at what point do we find the essence of the manifestation, the Christ.

Can we grasp the idea of ALL things being One and ALL things being that Energy, for lack of a better word, that is God. Can we see the idea that the bringing forth of this ALL into Being is the Christ, the essence of ALL things and that He is that Energy in a state of manifestation. We can sense this in this way: God IS the Thought and the Christ is the visualization of that thought, these are both the same thing but the one, the Christ has manifestation. Looking again at our chart, perhaps we can sense some of this:

We have put forth some rather deep information in this post but none that we have not seen in some way before. The complexity of this all and the lack of words and language make it difficult to put this all forth in a cogent manner and much is left to the discernment of the reader and, of course, his revelation. We will end here today as to not overwhelm any and pick up in the next post with a short review and then a similar treatment of the Holy Spirit.

In closing we repeat here some of the things that we have said about the Holy Spirit in our posts to date. These are in order of appearance and the post references are included to allow for going back to the essays again.

• The Holy Spirit can be seen as the presence in this world of the Spirit of Christ of which we all are a part or have a part in depending on your perspective. (In the words of Jesus part 22)
• Many teach that we are the temple of the Holy Spirit which lives in us when we complete some feat like baptism or some anointing but they still teach that the real man is this carnal human nature. Other churches teach that Christ comes to live in us at some point in our belief or by some baptism or affirmation but they still hold that the real man is this carnal human nature. For us, in this essay series, we are all of the above and none of them. (In the words of Jesus part 24)
• “how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him” (Luke 11:13).
• It is in the Holy Spirit that we find is the power of the Christ Within and a taste of the Presence of God. (In the words of Jesus part 46)
• That there is a Holy Spirit is, of course, true but His actions in this world and in the world of the Soul is sorely misunderstood. We should see the personalization of the Holy Spirit as the effect of the Soul, the Christ Within, on the outer life and form; the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Truth working out in our lives. Vincent says: It should be noted too that Jesus as well at the Holy Spirit is represented as Paraclete. The Holy Spirit is to be another Paraclete, and this falls in with the statement in the First Epistle (Johns) “we have an advocate with God, even Jesus Christ”⁴. He who has ears……  (In the words of Jesus part 79)
• This is the Constitution of Man; Spirit, Soul and the activity of Life in the body. We are not this body. This is the Constitution of God as far as we can understand it, the Father (Spirit), the Son (Soul or Christ) and the Holy Spirit (the Life activity in all the Kingdoms of Nature and the Universe). (In the words of Jesus part 81)
• There is no real understanding of what exactly the Holy Spirit is; there is no explanation in scripture and what we do understand is the product of man’s interpretations of what scripture does say. We have built much of our understanding on the parables of the Master that contain reference to God as the Spirit of God and to the third person renditions of the Spirit of God made apparent on the Earth. (In the words of Jesus part 159)
• There are also so many ideas in the church today about how to get the Holy Spirit, how to ‘be filled’ and how to tell if another is filled. With some there are requirements, be it a baptism of a special type or the laying on of hands by another who is ‘filled with the Spirit’; others say it is just a matter of hearing the word, by which it is assumed that hearing is understanding and believing. Many believe that the only evidences of the Holy Spirit in ones life is in their ability to ‘speak in tongues’ which is not another language but the ‘utterances of the Spirit’. While individually those professing that they know the ways to ‘be filled’ with the Holy Spirit with each believing it in their way and eschewing the ways of others, we should be able to see the degree of confusion at play here. The idea of being ‘filled with the Spirit’ has been taken to be a separate and a unique thing that is only for those who are ‘born again’ according to a particular doctrine and then to be baptized in some way ‘in’ the Spirit. (In the words of Jesus part 164)
• For us the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God as it is manifest in this creation; to have this Spirit in one’s life is the equivalent of having the Christ Within functioning within one’s conscious personality. This is the whole of the idea of Life in form; to bring the forces and the energies of the Soul into outer expression through our personalities and to live the Life of a Son of God here on this Earth. It is as we do this that we come into the Presence of God and into His Kingdom here and now. Being filled with the Spirit as a man in form is to have a personality that is focused on God in all His aspects and on doing His words. For us, the idea an evidence of being filled with the Spirit would be that such a one who is so filled would exhibit the Love and the Wisdom of the Lord and would be letting his Light shine forth through in his good works, and all this away and apart from the self-centered ways of the world. (In the words of Jesus part 164)
• We cannot dwell here on this today other than to briefly state that the constitution of man is such that we are the Spirit, the Life that IS, this is our true self and part and parcel of our God which manifests through the medium of the Christ Within, the Soul, which in turn is that manifestation of Life that lives through the conscious personality in form on Earth. When it is the Soul living through the conscious personality, then it is the Holy Spirit living actively in form. (In the words of Jesus part 164)

Note on the Quote of the Day