IN THE WORDS OF JESUS–Part 559

Love is the Fulfilling of the Law

ON LOVE; PART CXLVIII

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GoodWill IS Love in Action

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“This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.  And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth: And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters: And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died” (Genesis 5:1-5).

While it may appear that our subjects have been varied over the last several posts moving from the Creation of man in Genesis to our more recent discussion on Wisdom, these are in fact very related. In Genesis we see the beginnings of the True man, the Soul, taking on the human animal forms that have evolved to the necessary sophistication and which are capable of supporting the indwelling Life of the Soul. This evolution of form, apart from the Life of the True man, the Souls that we Truly ARE, is the True missing link in our study of evolution from the perspective of the reconciliation of the theories of science with the theories of religion and our saying above is a repetition of some of the key words that can lead us to this understanding if we can dispense with our reliance on the traditions and the doctrines that have their origins in the less intelligent, more emotional and superstitious past. This taking on of form brings to the forefront of the Life of the first man, Adam or whatsoever he may represent, the reality of the new struggle of the Pure Soul with the human form and to its instincts and its appetites and we must as well the altogether newness of the personality in the world, the emotional and the mental parts of this new Life in from; a personality that IS NOT enjoyed by the human animal before it is taken as the form of expression for the Soul on the Earth.

We should understand that there is nothing any more strange in this arrangement of ours than in any of the pronouncements of doctrine from the literal interpretation of this Creation of man; the same words apply. It is only our understanding that changes and in this change there CAN BE a more uniform approach that does not pit real science and it measurements and facts against a doctrine that in many cases refuses to move and, where doctrine does give way to science in principal, there is no resultant explanation other than a change in the timeline. We have focused our thoughts on the reality of the Life of the Souls taking form and the changes and the challenges that are presented to these first Souls that take to themselves human bodies and whether we consider this as the one man, Adam, and the one Woman, Eve, or as the first men in form who all came to be in the Earth in the same way as a group, the realities are for us the same. The story of the deception, the desire for and the tasting of the fruits of the Earth as happens in the Garden of Eden is the story of the devolvement of those Souls into a Life in the Earth. These Souls in their forms with their new found need to satisfy desires, both instinctive and emotional, and to satisfy at the same time the rationalizing thoughts about these desires, lose their focus as Souls in the Kingdom and put their attention onto the things of the flesh, the carnal thoughts of man that persist yet to today. Here they are deceived by what they see and feel, they begin wanting for the pleasure of these things and the taste the fruit which seals their fate as they come to believe that there is no deception but that this new Life is their new reality.

Scripture attributes this all to sin and from the True perspective that we should have on this word it is sin; this True perspective is however just the ways of the world and of man in the world. This right understanding of sin is that the Soul looks to the the things of the world for his pleasure and satisfaction and no longer to the realm of God that he had come from. Based upon our own understanding of our selves, this can be seen as the only way that this could all work out and, as we have said many times, we do not KNOW nor can we understand or comprehend the reasons for this ALL; neither can we KNOW, understand or comprehend any of this according to doctrine. The Apostle Paul puts this into a different perspective for us in his words to the Romans that we use so often to understand this creation as well as to understand our own plight in the world of things. Paul tells us:

“For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope, Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body” (Romans 8:20-23).

We must remember here that the apostle is writing to disciples and not to the ordinary man as he addresses his words to “To all that be in Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints” (Romans 1:7). and we should understand that these words are not to be taken as lightly as is often done in the churches today. In this Light, some of what he says above is intended for the saint, the disciple, and particularly the end point where he acknowledges that they, he and the disciples at Rome, “have the firstfruits of the Spirit“. In this Light also should we see the context of his explanation of the plight of man, the Plan of God and the expectation of deliverance. We should also here state that what we discern in these words is not what is generally seen by others. Relating this to the story of Genesis we have a simple explanation of what we are saying above as the man is “made subject to vanity“, to the illusion and the glamour of Life in the world and by this the deception that the first man encounters. We find also that this is done to man “not willingly” on his part, and in this we should see the reality of the vanity rather than the act of taking form, and this IS “by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope” who IS God and therefore our understanding that this IS the Plan of God.

In both our understanding of the Genesis of man and our discernment of Paul’s words we find the reality of Life in form complete with the vanity, the illusion and the glamour, that beset man as he takes on the forms of the human animal and begins his long journey of incarnations through those forms. The Genesis story ends in the removal of Adam and Eve from the Garden which we should see as their being focused upon the things of the world as caused by the deception, the desires for and the tasting of the fruits, the pleasures, of the Earth; they can no longer see the Tree of Life, their Souls in the Kingdom of God, and must now get past the Cherubim and the flaming sword on the Path of Return to “the glorious liberty of the children of God“. For us these obstacles represent the illusion and the glamour that must be overcome in order to properly focus upon the things of God. We see in the story that these first men are not born into form but are created in the verse: “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7) and it is this that we interpret as the Soul, “in the likeness of God” taking on the form and giving it his Life making of the human animal, the creature according to Paul, “a living soul“. As is depicted above and in the verses from the First Chapter, the True man, the Soul, is not in form but is created in “in the likeness of God“, a Trinity of Spirt, Soul and Expression, in the Kingdom of God.

From this point on man is born into the flesh of the human kingdom and in this his devolvement takes place over the years of childhood and when the growing man becomes a mature body, the Soul takes full possession of the form Life; this is of course a great variable and much is dependent on the Soul’s previously gained ability to build his forms.  Again, how and when this all happens is not KNOWN nor can we likely understand it but it does happen and this is also depicted for us by the Paul who tells us “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11) and this is a saying that can have several meaningful perspectives. It is when the child becomes a man that he can take control and begin to find his way back to God if he so chooses and if he can overcome the illusion and the glamour, the vanity, of Life in form. Mysteries abound in ALL of this but, as we said, they abound as much if not more in the doctrines and traditions of the churches.

It is here then that we came to the ideas that we put forth on deception over the last few posts and the cautions on being deceived that we get from the Master and from His apostles. This deception is the result of the illusion and the glamour that we are mired in and it is by our focus that we find ourselves falling deeper into this morass of emotions and thoughts; it is by our focus also that we can free ourselves and eventually stand and proclaim with Jesus that: “I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). As a part of this illusion and this glamour we have the false understandings of Wisdom and of Love, false from the perspective that we can believe that the wisdom of the world and the love of the world is the same as the Wisdom of God and the Love that IS God. These false understandings are maintained despite the proclamations of the apostles that serve to show that “the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God” and the like proclamations on Love that show its intended universality. In this vein we looked again at the words of the Apostle James and we took His saying on what IS NOT Wisdom from above and determined that ALL things, ALL thoughts and motivations, ALL actions that are oriented toward the self are NOT from above but are “earthly, sensual, devilish” (James 3:15). In these words from James we should also get a glimpse of the commonality of them; in these words that are elsewhere translated in a variety of ways that show these thoughts and motivations are in regard to the things of the world, the self and the senses and things that are considered sin and evil….they ARE NOT Wisdom from above. It is the same illusion and glamour, the same vanity, that blocks the Earth Life of Adam and Eve from seeing the reality of their former self-understanding which also keeps us from seeing clearly the Path back or as Paul tells us the Path “from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God“.

As we say above, ALL of these ideas and this working out of Life in form are related and whether the subject is the Genesis of man, the effects of illusion and glamour and deception or our exploration of the ideas of Wisdom and Love, they ALL have our progress from focus upon the things of the world to focus upon the things of God at heart.

Returning to our saying at the top which completes our look at the Book of Genesis for now, we should see some strange and interesting things. First we see a repetition of the creation of the True man, the Trinity of Spirit, Soul and Expression; we have premised that the idea here of creation in found in the Act by God of manifestation, of bringing into being of the Soul as the Expression of the Spirit which ever IS. We should see this from the perspective of the Eternal Soul expressing the Life of the Spirit in the MIND OF GOD and we say it this way as there is no better way of comprehension. Most importantly, we should NOT see this as the creation of the man in form because there is then no way then to reconcile the idea that “in the likeness of God made he him” for God is not a man in the Earth and is not like a man in the Earth in any way. A look at how John Gill in his Exposition of the Bible ⁸ interprets this part can give us some understanding of the way this is treated in doctrine by some: So God created man in his own image Which consisted both in the form of his body, and the erect stature of it, different from all other creatures; in agreement with the idea of that body, prepared in covenant for the Son of God, and which it was therein agreed he should assume in the fulness of time; and in the immortality of his soul, and in his intellectual powers, and in that purity, holiness, and righteousness in which he was created; as well as in his dominion, power, and authority over the creatures, in which he was as God’s viceregent, and resembled him. The Jerusalem Targum is, “the Word of the Lord created man in his likeness;” even that Word that was in the beginning with God, and was God, and in time became incarnate, by whom all things were made, ( John 1:1-3 John 1:14 )⁸. The idea here in part is that God is like man from the perspective of what Christ would look like; this requires the assumption that the body of Jesus is the Christ and not the vehicle of the Christ as our bodies are the vehicle of the Soul and that this body nature was with God, and was God, and in time became incarnate ⁸. We separate the this act of the Creation of man as the Soul according to the scripture that tells us  “in the likeness of God made he him; Male and female created he them” from the secondary creation of the man in form where the body is formed “of the dust of the ground” and we find the combination of the Soul and the body in this place where we are told that God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul“.

Our understanding of the idea of “Male and female created he them” is of course found in our reality that as Souls and as Spirit there is no male and female but that they are neither and they are both. We offer greater detail on this as well as our thoughts on multiply and replenish the earth, in the past posts that all may reference by using the search box on this home page. Going further in our verse above we find that God “called their name Adam” and in this we should remember that the translation of this Hebrew word ‘adam is: man, mankind; man, human being; man, mankind (much more frequently intended sense in OT); Adam, first man ², and the translation of this Hebrew word varies as translators choice and in no way reflects the proper name that we have assigned for it. We should note here that there is no indication of time in these sayings and this is clarified twice by the words “In the day“. It is interesting also to note that Cain and Able are totally forgotten here in this part and that the generations of Adam begin with Seth, Adam’s third son according to scripture. Here we also read that Seth is begat in Adam’s “own likeness, after his image” and perhaps this is written this way to show the differences of which we speak.

No matter how one views the process of creation as it is provided in the Book of Genesis, we should KNOW one thing for certain, it was not intended to be taken literally and we close this today by repeating Alexander MacLaren’s words on this:

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 ¹².

We will begin with a new topic in the next post.

Note on the Quote of the Day

This daily blog also has a Quote of the Day which may not be in any way related to the essay. Many of these will be from the Bible and some just prayers or meditations that may have an influence on you and are in line with the subject matter of this blog. As the quote will change daily and will not store with the post, it is repeated in this section with the book reference and comment:

We leave our words on Wisdom for yet another day.

Since we are centered on the ideas of Wisdom today we offer the following from Proverbs as our Quote of the Day. Solomon, who is KNOWN for his Wisdom, which we read in the story of his Life was His gift from God, a gift that he receives because he does not want for the things of the world. But Solomon gains as well the things of the world in plenty and as his Life story proceeds we can see clearly that it is his Life in the world that is to his detriment. The wisdom however produces for us the writings of the Book of Proverbs and it is this that he is remembered for. His Life is interesting reading and is well documented in the Books of Kings and Chronicles.

….incline thine ear unto wisdom, and apply thine heart to understanding; Yea, if thou criest after knowledge, and liftest up thy voice for understanding; If thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasures; Then shalt thou understand the fear of the LORD, and find the knowledge of God. For the LORD giveth wisdom: out of his mouth cometh knowledge and understanding. He layeth up sound wisdom for the righteous: he is a buckler to them that walk uprightly. He keepeth the paths of judgment, and preserveth the way of his saints. Then shalt thou understand righteousness, and judgment, and equity; yea, every good path. When wisdom entereth into thine heart, and knowledge is pleasant unto thy soul; Discretion shall preserve thee, understanding shall keep thee (Proverbs 2:2-11).

• ² Old Testament Hebrew Lexicon on BibleStudyTools.com
• ⁸ Bible commentaries on BibleStudyTools.com
• ¹² Expositions of Holy Scripture–Project Gutenberg’s Expositions of Holy Scripture, by Alexander Maclaren–(1826-1910)