Words of Jesus from the Great Gospel of John
Knowledge of God
Jesus Christ: “For only those who truly know God come to God and are actually already with God; but those who do not know God cannot come to God either, because they do not know God and therefore are not with God. For to come to God means already to be with God through pure knowledge and love, because without pure and true knowledge no one can truly love God.
What use is it to your soul if you believe in a God somewhere behind all the stars and also believe that from there, as from an eternal center, by virtue of His omnipotence He hears and sees everything and creates, preserves, and governs everything, and that therefore with His power He permeates everything and is present everywhere, if nevertheless you do not know God in the least and in your disposition are much farther removed from Him than the infinite distance at which you imagine Him to be? Through such a most hazy, nightlike knowledge of God you are certainly still very far from Him, cannot possibly love Him, but can only have a half-believing dull inkling of Him and reverence toward Him. And in this state of knowledge and disposition no one can be with God, and there can never be any talk of true love.
Or what would a young man ready for marriage say, to whom several daughters nearby were very pleasing, one of whom he could love with all his heart, if one said to him: ‘There is nothing here for you! In the most distant part of the world there is a bride for you; fall in love with her, travel there, and take her as your wife!’? Will he not ask you and say: ‘Yes, where is that? Is it toward sunrise or sunset, south or north?’ And you will be unable truthfully to tell him anything other than: ‘Well, we ourselves do not know, but she will surely be somewhere; just love her and seek her!’ Do you suppose the young man will ever fall in love with a maiden so far removed from him or play the fool for you and seek her in all four quarters of the world? I tell you he will very wisely leave that undone!—And things are not much better with love for a completely unknown God standing infinitely far away.
But what then is the other bad consequence of this? Because people can neither know nor still less love a God who is too distant and too unknown, they make for themselves nearer gods whom they then honor, love, and worship and to whom they bring all kinds of sacrifices. They do indeed build an empty temple for the one true God as well, into which very little light is allowed to enter, and this is dedicated to the unknown God. The Romans made from this their blind fate, which rules even over all their gods. From this, however, it follows clearly enough where a poor knowledge of God eventually leads people.”
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Conquering the Kingdom of God
Jesus Christ: “Therefore seek above all the Kingdom of God on Earth; seek it within yourselves, and everything else will then be given to you with the Kingdom of God within you. But without it, a human being—even if he possessed all the treasures of the Earth and contained within himself the sciences of all the sages of the world—has as much as nothing.
But one who possesses the Kingdom of God in his heart has everything. He has all sciences within himself, indeed the highest and deepest, and has eternal life and its strength and power, and that is surely more than everything people in this world have ever recognized as great and most valuable.
Tomorrow in Emmaus you will all convince yourselves what it means to be a perfect human being. I tell you: a truly perfect human being is capable of more than all other imperfect people on the whole Earth. Therefore strive above all to become perfect human beings. If you are that, then you are everything and have everything.
But I also tell you that attaining the Kingdom of God now requires force. Those who want to have it must properly seize it by force; those who do not do this will hardly obtain it here on Earth already in full living possession.”
Then the magician said: “O Lord, how can that happen, how can weak and insignificant man do violence to the Kingdom of God and properly seize it? Then there is also the question where the true Kingdom of God is located so that man can grasp it and seize it!”
Jesus said: “In this short time of several hours you have already heard quite a bit and have even recognized Me, and still you do not know what the Kingdom of God is and what it consists in?!
The perfect observance of the recognized will of God is the true Kingdom of God within you! But the observance of the recognized will of God is not as easy as you imagine, for worldly people strongly oppose it and persecute the true aspirants to the Kingdom of God. Therefore the one who wants fully to appropriate the Kingdom of God must have no fear of those who can only kill the human body but cannot harm the soul; rather let the human being fear God, who according to His eternally unchangeable order can also cast the soul into hell!
Whoever fears God more than people and, despite the persecution people can inflict upon him, does the recognized will of God, he is the one who seizes the Kingdom of God by force; and whoever does this will also unfailingly obtain it.
But to this there belongs something more that also belongs to the forceful seizure of the Kingdom of God, and it consists in the human being denying himself as deeply as possible in all things of the world, forgiving all his offenders from the heart, bearing no grudge or anger toward anyone, praying for those who curse him, doing good to those who do evil to him, elevating himself above no one, patiently enduring the temptations that now and then come upon him, and abstaining from gluttony, drunken excess, fornication, and adultery. Whoever practices this within himself also does violence to the Kingdom of God and seizes it by force.
But whoever does indeed know God, esteem and love Him above all, and also his neighbor as himself, but at the same time esteems and fears the world and does not dare openly to confess My name because it could bring him some worldly disadvantage, he does no violence to the Kingdom of God and in this way will not fully obtain it in this world either, and in the beyond he will still have to endure many struggles until he is perfected.
Whoever now knows and believes that I am the promised Messiah must also do what I teach, have taught, and will continue to teach; otherwise he is not worthy of Me, and I will not be especially helpful to him in the development of his inner life. But I am the life of the soul through My Spirit within it, and this is called love for God. Whoever therefore loves God above all and for that reason always does His will, his soul is filled with My Spirit, and this is the perfection and eternal life of the soul.
But if someone knows Me and nevertheless fears the world and says to himself: ‘Yes, I very well recognize the Messiah and secretly believe everything He teaches and do it too; but because the world is once as it is and one must live with it, outwardly before the world I let nothing of what I secretly confess within myself be noticed, so that no one can speak evil of me!’—he is no true confessor of My being and name and does not yet have the true and living love for God, and in this way in this earthly life he will hardly obtain within himself the fullness of the Kingdom of God; for the fullness of the Kingdom of God consists precisely in the highest love for God, and this has no fear or shyness before the world.
Whoever confesses Me before the world when it is necessary, him I too will confess before the Father in heaven; but whoever does not confess Me before the world when it is necessary, him I too will not confess before the Father in heaven.”
Here the magician immediately asked, saying: “Lord, who then is Your Father, and where is heaven? Can You too, as the Lord of eternity, have a Father?”
Jesus said: “The eternal love in God is the Father, and His unlimited wisdom is heaven. Whoever loves God above all confesses God and thus Me before all the world, and I too confess him in My love, and therein consists the true eternal life of the human soul. And because through such living love for God the human being also reaches and must reach the highest wisdom—and such wisdom is heaven or the Kingdom of God—the human being has thereby also obtained the Kingdom of God within himself, which then can never again be taken from him. This I have now explained to you; retain it, write it into your hearts and act accordingly, and you will have eternal and true life within you!”
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The Kingdom of Heaven Requires Force
Jesus Christ: “But in the days of this dark time the Kingdom of God suffers violence, and those who want to possess it must also seize it by force, which means that it is now difficult to rid oneself of all the old and rusted habits that have taken root in the human being from the enticements and temptations of the world, thus to put off the old human being entirely like an old, torn garment and from My teaching put on an entirely new human being.
But if in later times children are already well educated in My teaching, then as adults full of good and strong will they will have a light yoke to carry in My teaching.
My teaching, however, is in itself quite brief and easy to grasp; for it demands nothing of the human being except that he believe in one true God and love Him above all as the good Father and Creator and his fellow human being as himself, that is, do to him everything of which he can reasonably wish that his fellow human being should do the same to him. Surely every human being has enough self-love that he will not wish his fellow human being to do him anything evil, and so let him do the same to his fellow human being as well!
Never repay evil with evil, but even do good to your enemies, and you will have made great progress in becoming like God, who likewise causes His sun to rise and shine over good and evil alike! Anger and revenge must depart from your hearts; in their place compassion, goodness, and gentleness must enter. Where this is the case, full likeness to God is no longer far away, and this is the goal toward which alone you all have to strive.
But as already said, this matter precisely in this time is not quite as easy as someone might imagine. It will cost everyone a certain and unavoidable effort! Yet whoever fights courageously will also be sure of his victory, and the victor’s reward will truly not remain by the wayside; but whoever proves himself a fainthearted coward will also reap the reward of a coward. Then it will also be said: had you fought, you would also have conquered; but because you shunned the battle, you can also make no claim to the victor’s reward and have only yourself to blame that as a coward you must leave the field of life without reward. But I think that no one should shun the battle where the prize of victory is so high.
I am the One who tells you this, and I am of the opinion for you that you surely need no higher proof if within yourselves you believe that I am the One for whom you yourselves have recognized Me.”
The two Romans said: “Lord, there may indeed be cowards, and we ourselves know several of them; but we, who have so often wrestled with death, have lost all fear of it! Whoever goes to war and fears death is a bad warrior; but whoever despises death and its pain is a true hero, will usually conquer, and his reward will not remain by the wayside. O Lord and Master of eternity in Your Spirit, have we spoken rightly or not?”
I said: “Perfectly rightly; but there are very many in the world who greatly fear the death of the body and therefore prefer to remain attached to the lie and deception of the world so that only their body may fare well! They fear those who kill their body but then can do nothing more to the soul; but they do not fear the One who can also cast their soul into hell or into true eternal death.
But let us leave that; for I have not come into this world to hold judgment here, but to make blessed and alive everyone who believes in Me and lives according to My teaching. Yet one day there will nevertheless be many who will cry to Me, ‘Lord, Lord!’; but I will say to them in their hearts: Why do you strangers call? I do not know you! You knew that I am the Lord and knew My will—why then did you not act according to it?
Therefore I now say to you: it is not enough that one recognizes Me and believes that I am the Lord, but one must also do what I teach you; only through action will the human being attain full likeness to God.
But acting according to My teaching will surely not be difficult for the one who has rightly recognized Me and loves Me more than everything in the world; whoever loves Me in this way already carries Me spiritually in his heart and thus also the fullness of life, hence full likeness to God, and in all bliss eternal life.”
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Control of Thoughts
Jesus Christ: “You can think whatever you want, and through that you cannot sin as long as your heart takes no pleasure in a disorderly thought. But if you take pleasure in a bad thought, then you already connect your will with the bad thought, devoid of all love of neighbor, and you are not far from allowing such a thought, once already enlivened by your pleasure and your will, to pass into action if circumstances appear favorable to you and permit the deed without outward danger. Therefore wise supervision of the thoughts arising in the human heart through the purified light of the intellect and pure reason is of the highest importance, because the thought is the seed of the deed; and the necessary and wise supervision of thoughts could truly not be expressed more aptly than by Moses saying: ‘Do not let yourself lust after this and that!’ For once you begin strongly to lust after something, your thought is already enlivened by your pleasure and by your will, and you will then have difficulty completely suffocating such an enlivened thought within yourself. Thought and idea are, as said earlier, the seed of the deed, which is the fruit of the seed. As the seed, so also the fruit!
You may therefore think whatever you want; but do not enliven any thought or idea into fruit until you have properly tested it before the judgment seat of your intellect and reason. If the thought has passed the test of light and fire there, only then may you enliven it into fruit or deed, and then you may indeed desire something good and true; but you should not desire anything disorderly that manifestly goes against love of neighbor! And therein lies what Moses expressed in his last law, and therein there is truly never and nowhere the contradiction with the inner functions of life which, with the help of your sharp-witted rabbi, you claim to have found. What shall, indeed what can, become of a human being if he does not early learn to examine his thoughts, order them, and separate everything impure, evil, and false from them? I tell you, such a human being would become worse and more evil than the most ravenous and wicked beast!
In the good and wise ordering of thoughts lies the whole value of a human life… for as long as a human being does not become completely master of his thoughts, so long he will not become master of his passions and the actions arising from them either. But whoever is not lord and master within and over himself is still far from the Kingdom of God and is and remains a servant of sin, which is born from his disorderly thoughts and the desires arising from them and defiles the whole human being. Have you understood this?”
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Spiritual Perfection
Jesus Christ: “Spiritual works and spiritual paths are not measured by hours and cubits, but purely by the strength of the will, faith, and love for God and neighbor.
Whoever could at once deny himself to such an extent as to leave the whole world entirely, devote his treasures—in the right measure—only to the poor out of pure love for God, and practice no immorality with the flesh of women, would truly already stand perfected in the shortest time! But whoever obviously needs a longer time to cleanse himself from all earthly dross and attachments, with him the most blissful state of true spiritual perfection must also take longer to arrive.
But you are high officials of state and must fulfill your office; yet before God that is no obstacle that could prevent you from walking rightly on the paths shown you by Me, but rather it gives you the means by which you can all the more easily and sooner attain true spiritual perfection.
But do not suppose that you are the office and the honor and reputation of the office! The honor and reputation of the office is the law, and you are only its servants. Yet if you are faithful and good and just, then you yourselves also stand in the honor and reputation of the law, and the merit of the law toward the people who are protected by the law and are calm and secure will then also accrue to you before God.
You are also exceedingly rich people; but your great wealth too is no obstacle to attaining the purely spiritual state if you deal with it with true love for God and neighbor like good and wise fathers toward their children and are not stingy and miserly in supporting the poor; for with the measure in which you bestow your love upon the poor, in that same measure God will repay you spiritually at all times and in case of need also naturally.
But if you think that God does not help the human being who diligently and earnestly advances on the path to the Kingdom of God and life of the Spirit when now and then he becomes tired and weak, then you err greatly. I tell you: whoever has once seriously entered this path will also, even without his knowledge, be helped by God so that he continues and finally safely reaches the goal.
God will of course not force the union of the soul with the spirit from Him by His omnipotence, but He will increasingly illuminate the human heart and fill it with true wisdom from the heavens, and thereby the human being will grow spiritually and become stronger and will overcome all obstacles that might still place themselves in his path for greater testing ever more easily and confidently.
The more love a human being begins to feel alive within himself for God and neighbor, and the more merciful he becomes in his disposition, the greater and stronger the Spirit of God has already become in his soul. For love for God and from it love for neighbor is precisely the Spirit of God in the human soul. As this increases and grows, so also the Spirit of God within it. If in the end the whole human being has become pure and most beneficent love, then the complete union of the soul with the Spirit from God has already taken place, and the human being has forever reached the highest goal of life set for him by God.
God Himself is in Himself the highest and purest love, and so also is the Spirit from God assigned to every human being. If through its free willing the soul becomes wholly like the love of the Spirit from God, then it is clear that it becomes one with the Spirit from God within it. But when it becomes that, then it is also perfected in God. For this, however, no exact time can be determined; rather the soul’s own feeling must tell and show it.
True, pure, and living love is in itself supremely unselfish; it is full of humility, active, full of patience and compassion; it never unnecessarily burdens anyone and gladly endures everything; it takes no pleasure in the need of its neighbor, but its tireless striving is to help everyone who needs help.
Thus pure love is also chaste in the highest degree and takes no pleasure in the lust of the flesh, but all the greater delight in the pure morality of the heart. When the human soul is likewise constituted through its own voluntary striving and endeavor, then the soul is already like its spirit and is thus also perfected in God.
And so you now know quite exactly what you have to do in order to attain purely spiritual perfection. Whoever diligently strives for all this will also be perfected soonest.
But whoever diligently and earnestly strives to walk this path will also always and most truly and surely be helped by God so that he will reach the highest goal of life, of which you can all be fully assured; for if God already came to your aid through Me now, when you had hardly begun from a great distance to notice that there might be such a path, how much more will He come to your aid when you actively walk on the path yourselves! Have you understood that?”
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Religious Compulsion
Here they all said again: “Lord and Master! Everything, everything has from eternity been solely Your work and solely Your merit! We human beings are at all times nothing at all compared with You! Only Your love and grace have given us existence and now even wish to raise us to children like You, and thus we ourselves are in everything Your work, and our excellence is solely Your merit! O Lord and Master, only never, never leave us; for without You we are wholly nothing! What would we know from ourselves of all these spiritual things, of You and Your almighty will? And just as now we owe everything to You alone, so our later descendants too will owe everything only to You, if possibly they still remain in our understanding and in our pure faith. But You, O Lord and Master, will surely see to it that they do not get too far from the light that now shines so brightly for us!”
Jesus said: “That will, as until now, continue to be left to the workers of My fields and vineyards; and there it will depend very much on how My will, now well recognized by them, is handled, whether rightly or perhaps wrongly. Therefore take great care that after My bodily departure from you no quarrels and disputes arise, for these would then truly become the mother of the antichrist on this Earth! I tell you this beforehand so that you prevent it. You yourselves will indeed prevent it; whether your later disciples will do so as well is another question, because their free will too must be respected just like yours.
My teaching gives you the highest freedom and therefore cannot be proclaimed with the sword and with the chains of dark slavery; for what can and will provide the human being with the highest freedom of life must also be recognized and accepted by him in his full freedom. But as I have given you all this freely, so you too should give it freely again to those who wish to have it from you!
Thus I too imposed compulsion upon none of you, but in fullest freedom only called to you: whoever wills, let him come, hear, see, and follow Me! And you did that out of your free will. And so continue to do in My name, and you will have a good path to walk!
But whoever makes a ‘must’ out of it will not be My disciple, and on his path he will find rocks, cliffs, and thorns. All take from Me a right and true example! What would it cost Me now in one moment to compel all people on the whole Earth through My omnipotence to accept My teaching and fully obey My will, just as it is possible for Me in one moment to prescribe by compulsion to every other creature the path it must strictly walk according to My will? But what independent, truly self-blessing, moral freedom of life would it have in that? I tell you: none at all!
For a dull and highly limited intelligence with a spark of My compulsory will according to which it must act is surely a very different thing from an inward perception unlimited in every possible direction, joined with luminous reason, clear understanding, and in addition the most unrestrictedly free will, to which I never gave My commandments and My Fatherly counsel through a ‘You must!’ but always only through the free ‘You should!’ For all the commandments I gave to people were actually never laws, but only counsels that My eternal love and wisdom gave to free human beings. Only afterward did people, thinking thereby to show Me all the greater honor, make from these counsels of Mine given to people laws to be most strictly kept, whose nonobservance they sanctioned with temporal and eternal punishments.
Moses himself did much toward this in order to procure for the Jews all the greater respect for the revealed will of God, and others did the same. And the present Pharisees have reached the highest culmination not only of stupidity but also of the wickedness necessarily arising from it. That the matter of Judaism now stands on such indescribably bad footing is a necessary consequence of people having made compulsory laws out of My counsels given with the greatest freedom. But how can a compulsory law accord with the freest will and the equally free and by nothing restricted understanding of human beings?
The free will of the human being will surely gladly and always with the greatest thanks accept a bright illumination of his understanding as a grace from above; but a strict compulsory law he will curse in his will and disposition. Therefore every human being who stands under a compulsory law is as good as continually judged and thus also as if cursed.
Whoever therefore gives people compulsory laws in My name will give them, instead of My blessing, only the hard yoke and heavy burden of the curse and make them new slaves of sin and judgment.
Therefore in spreading My commandments let your concern above all be that you do not load upon their necks a new and hard-to-bear yoke, but rather that through them you make them free from the old one!
When the human being with free disposition recognizes and understands the luminous truth of My teaching and My best Fatherly will, then he will by himself with his free will make from it a free law of obligation and will freely act according to it, and that alone will serve the true well-being of his soul. But a compulsory law given to him will hardly ever or never do so, and this because first, a compulsory law is wholly contrary to My divine order for the free will of a human being and only darkens the human being and never enlightens him; and second, because with compulsory law the lawgivers immediately arrogate to themselves a higher power belonging only to them, therefore soon become proud, arrogant, and domineering, and to the ordinances pronounced as purely divine they also add, from an assumed possession of divine authority before which their believers often must tremble more than before God Himself, their own wicked ordinances as divine and newly revealed will to them, and place upon their observance always a much greater weight than upon observing the purely divine commandments.
From this then arise dark superstition, idolatry, hatred against those of other faiths, persecution, murder, and the most devastating wars. People justify themselves in this with all kinds of dark nonsense until in the end they come to the opinion and belief that they render God a pleasing service when they commit the greatest outrages and crimes against their fellow human beings of another faith. And the compulsory lawgivers alone are to blame for this!
Therefore in the beyond too, in hell, whose zealous servants they were here, they will surely occupy the first places under the most inexorable compulsory laws; for in My heavens only the highest freedom rules, but through it also the highest harmony, brought about by pure love and greatest wisdom.
I have now faithfully and openly presented this to you and explained it in light, and you now know freely without the least inner compulsion what you as spreaders of My Gospel have to observe. But if someone among you or your disciples should wish to act otherwise, he will indeed be warned, but no inner compulsion will therefore be laid upon him by Me. Yet by the lazy and bad fruits better people will soon notice whose spirit such a later disciple is a child of.
But because I now make this known to you, you should nevertheless not believe that I thereby abolish the law given through Moses; for it is exactly the same that I give you again in its original purity. Only the old rusted ‘must’ I abolish and give you back the old full freedom; and in this consists chiefly the work of redemption of your souls from the hard yoke of judgment and of the actual Satan, the prince of night and darkness already known to you, that from now on you should no longer stand under any compulsory law in My name.
But as I now give all of you full freedom again from Myself, so in My name do the same for your brothers! Baptize them in the name of My eternal love, which is the Father, of the Word, which is the Father’s Son become flesh, and of His Spirit of all truth, and thereby extinguish in them the old inherited evil, which is the condemnable ‘must’ of the law now well known to you! And now I ask you whether you have all understood this.”
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The Trinity in God and Man
Then a Pharisee came to Me and said: “Lord and Master! In Your discourse to us You said that Your disciples, who will spread Your true doctrine of life, are to baptize—meaning strengthen by the laying on of their hands—those who have fully accepted Your teaching in deed, in the name of the Father, who is love; in the name of the Word, which is the Son or the wisdom of the Father; and in the name of the Holy Spirit, who is the all-powerful will of the Father and the Son.
But I think this: If Your disciples baptized all who have come to believe only in Your name or in the name of the Father alone, that would prevent many disputes that could easily arise from this later on. For through the three conceptual names, though they are the highest and holiest, people of weaker understanding could in time very easily be brought to believe in three separate gods as three divine persons, just as the ancient pure belief in only one true God among the ancient Egyptians, in the course of time, made from the many attributes of Jehovah an innumerable multitude of gods, which the blind imagination of human beings then transformed into all kinds of self-existing and separately acting divine beings, built temples to them, and worshiped them separately; but in doing so also sank into the crudest materialism to such a degree that it often ascribed to the divine personalities thus imagined the meanest human weaknesses and vicious passions.
With time—say after several centuries—the same thing could happen again: more foolish and blind people, merely because of the highest conceptual names heard at baptism, might begin to imagine three gods; and then it certainly would not take long before people began to worship separately the three gods thus imagined in temples built especially for them. If that happens, it will also not be long before people begin to honor Your disciples, known to them by name, and their successors in the same way as You, and to worship them in temples built for them. In my opinion this could be prevented most easily and permanently if God were made known to human beings under only one conceptual name. What do You say to that?”
Jesus said: “In that you have spoken very well and rightly; yet I still cannot refrain from laying it upon all your hearts to do this, for under the three conceptual names the essence of God is presented to human beings as though fully explained.
It is true that to a person weak in comprehension a kind of divine three-personhood thereby appears; but in order to remain completely faithful to the deepest and innermost truth in everything, it cannot be presented otherwise than as it is.
See, man is created wholly in the likeness of God, and whoever wishes to know himself completely must know and recognize within himself that, as one and the same human being, he actually consists of three personalities. First you have a body, furnished with all the necessary senses and other limbs and components required for a free and independent life, from the largest down to the scarcely conceivable smallest. For the development of the spiritual soul within it, this body has a natural life entirely its own, which differs strictly in every respect from the spiritual life of the soul. The body lives on material nourishment, from which the blood and other nutritive fluids for its various components are formed.
The heart has within itself a specially animated mechanism of such a kind that it must continually expand and then contract again; by this means it drives the blood that gives life to the body, together with the other fluids arising from it, into all its parts, and through contraction takes it back into itself again in order to saturate it with new nutritive elements and then once more drive it outward to nourish the most varied components of the body. In these countless and extremely varied components dwell just as many different nature spirits, which take from the blood the nourishing and preserving substances suitable to them and necessary for the nourishment and maintenance of precisely those parts governed by such a spirit; they then assimilate these substances to the parts governed by them—that is, by their own spirits—and in this way invigorate and strengthen the whole body. Without this continual independent activity of the heart, a human being could not live bodily for a single hour.
See, the soul has nothing whatever to do with this activity of life, for it has no connection with the soul’s free will; and the same is true of the independent activity of the lungs, liver, spleen, stomach, intestines, kidneys, and countless other components of its body, which the soul does not even know and for which it therefore cannot care. Yet the body, as a personality completely closed in upon itself, is one and the same human being and acts and behaves as though both were one and exactly the same personality. But who among you can say that body and soul are completely one thing?
Now let us consider the soul by itself, and we shall find that it too is in itself a completely perfect human being, containing within and for itself, in spiritual substance, the very same components as the body and making use of them in a higher spiritual correspondence just as the body uses its material ones.
Although on the one hand the body and on the other the soul represent in themselves two entirely different human beings or persons, each of which has an activity wholly peculiar to itself—an activity whose how and why they cannot in the end even account for—nevertheless, in the foundation of the true purpose of life they constitute wholly only one human being, so that no one can say or claim of himself or of another that he is not one human being but only a twofold human being. For the body must serve the soul and the soul, with its understanding and will, must serve the body; therefore the soul is just as responsible for the actions for which it used the body as for its very own actions, which consist in all kinds of thoughts, wishes, desires, and cravings.
But if we consider still more closely the life and being of the soul by itself, we shall soon and easily find that, as a still substantial bodily human being in itself, it would stand no higher than, say, the soul of an ape. It would indeed possess instinctive reason in a somewhat higher degree than a common animal, but there could never be any question of an understanding and a higher free judgment of things and their relationships.
This higher, and actually highest, faculty in the soul, wholly like God, is brought about by a third human being, purely spiritual in essence, dwelling precisely within the soul. Through him it can distinguish true from false and good from evil, and can think freely in every imaginable direction and will completely freely; and according as it determines itself, with its free will supported by him, for what is purely true and good, it gradually becomes entirely like the spirit dwelling within it—strong, powerful, wise, and, as reborn in him, identical with him.
When this is the case, the soul is virtually one being with its spirit, just as the nobler bodily parts of a perfected soul—which bodily parts actually consist in the very different nature spirits of the body—pass wholly into the spiritual-substantial body, which you may call the flesh of the soul, and finally through this into the essential body of the spirit. By this is also to be understood the true resurrection of the flesh on the latest and truest day of the soul’s life, which occurs when a human being is completely reborn in the spirit, either already here in this life or, somewhat more laboriously and slowly, in the beyond.
Although a human being completely reborn in the spirit is wholly only one perfect human being, his being nevertheless remains eternally in a trinity that can indeed be distinguished within itself. How this is, I will now show you all quite clearly; therefore pay close attention!
In every thing, if only you will be a little attentive, and in every object, you perceive a distinguishable threefoldness. The first thing that catches your eye is certainly the outer form; for without it no thing or object could be conceived and none would have existence. The second, once the first is there, is clearly the content of things and objects; for without it they too would not exist and would have no form or outward shape. What then is the third, just as necessary to the existence of a thing or object as the first and second? See, it is an inner force inherent in every thing and object, which in a sense holds together the content of things and objects and constitutes their actual essence. And because this very force produces the content and thus also the outer form of things and objects, it is also the fundamental essence of all existence, whatever its nature; and without it a being, thing, or object would be just as inconceivable as without content and without an outer form.
You now see that the three parts named are certainly distinguishable in themselves, since the outer form is not its content and the content is not itself the force that conditions it. And yet the three parts named are completely one; for if there were no force, there would also be no content and certainly no form of it.
Let us now return to our soul. For secure and definite existence the soul must first have an outer form, namely that of a human being. The outer form is therefore what we call the body or the flesh, whether still material or spiritualized-substantial; that makes no difference here. But if the soul is present as a human being according to form, it will also have a content corresponding to the outer form. This content or inner body of the soul is its own living essence itself—that is, the soul.
But if all this is present, then the force that conditions the whole soul is also present, and this is the spirit, which in the end is all in all, since without it a solid substance would be impossible and without this there would be no body and therefore no outer form. Although the three clearly distinguishable personalities are as a whole only one being, they must nevertheless be named and recognized separately as distinguishable.
In the spirit, or eternal essence, dwells love as the force that brings everything about, the highest intelligence, and the living, firm will; all this together produces the substance of the soul and gives it the form or essence of the body.
Once the soul or human being exists according to the will and intelligence of the spirit, the spirit withdraws into the innermost depth and gives the soul that now exists, according to its innermost will and intelligence, a free will as though separated from itself and a free and in a certain sense independent intelligence. The soul appropriates this partly through the external senses of perception and partly through inner awareness, and then perfects it in such a way as though the perfected free intelligence were its own work.
As a result of this necessarily constituted state, in which it feels itself as though separated from its spirit, the soul is capable of both external and internal revelation. If it receives this, accepts it, and acts accordingly, it thereby also begins to unite itself with its spirit and then enters ever more into his unlimited freedom, both with regard to intelligence and freedom of will according to that luminous intelligence and also with regard to the strength and power to be able to accomplish everything it recognizes and wills.
From this you can again recognize that the soul, as the thought of the spirit transformed into living substance—which in the foundation is the spirit itself—can nevertheless in a certain sense be regarded as a second thing proceeding from the spirit, without for that reason being anything other than the spirit itself.
That the soul finally appears as an individual clothed also with an outer body, which in a sense appears as the third personality, daily experience shows you. The body serves the soul as an outward revelation of its innermost spirit and has the purpose of turning the intelligence and free will of the soul outward, limiting them, and only then seeking and surely finding the inner unlimitedness of intelligence and will and their true power, thereby to become an endlessly glorified and completely individually independent one with the innermost spirit, which is always the sole actual something and all-pervading being of man.
Since from this explanation of Mine you must now, I hope, understand how a human being in and for himself, and likewise every other being in subordinate degrees, consists of a certain distinguishable three, let us, in conclusion to this most important explanation and discussion, pass over to the triune being of God Himself, so that you may clearly and brightly understand why, because of the higher and inner living truth, I had to command you to baptize—that is, strengthen—those human beings who believe in Me and have accepted My teaching in deed, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
And so pay close attention once more to what you will now hear from My mouth for the truest completion of the whole. See, the Scripture of the prophets, as all of you now know very well, says and explains that I, named Jesus, Christ—also called the Son of Man—am the true God, although He is designated and named under different names as Father, Son, and Spirit. And yet God is only one personal glory in the most perfect form of a human being.
Just as, as you now know, the soul, its outer body, and its innermost spirit are united so that they constitute only one being or, in a certain sense, in the end only one individual substance, yet among themselves are a clearly distinguishable three, even so are Father, Son, and Spirit united, as the Scripture of the ancient fathers and prophets also clearly teaches, as mentioned above.
David once said that his soul, his body, and his spirit might be found blameless before God. But if the words of the ancient wise king ran thus, could one not also say and ask: ‘What? Does man then consist of three persons or of three human beings?’ But if that cannot apply even to man, in whom, for the sake of his formation and true perfection of life, the division of his three is tangibly necessary, how much less could God, who in Himself from eternity is most perfectly only One, be divided into three different persons or even into three gods?”
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The Principal Task of Man
Jesus Christ: “Friend and brother Mark, son of Aurelia, the most chaste and well-educated patrician woman, you have not merely understood the instruction given to you approximately rightly and well, but you have hit the nail on the head; and I say here once more: Thus the light will be taken from the Jews and given to the much wiser Gentiles. For the long night of the Gentiles has turned into day, and the day of the Jews sinks into the thickest night.
Bring them to Me from all Jerusalem and from all Judea, and not one will be found among them who could now compare with this Mark of Mine in true wisdom!
Truly I tell you that with your right understanding you have now given My heart great joy; for My words have become alive in your heart! Therefore you and your companions will in the shortest time attain the full rebirth in My Spirit within yourselves.
But you, Mark, are already standing at the entrance of the narrow little gate of life into your fundamental chamber of life; for if that were not the case, you would not have grasped My words in such depth of light as you have grasped them. For your flesh cannot give this to a human being, but only My Spirit already awakened within him for his soul.
From this all of you can now see and recognize in what depths of truth and wisdom those will find themselves who will enjoy the full rebirth of their souls in My Spirit. I tell you here once more what I have already told you many times: No human eye has ever seen, no human ear has ever heard, and no human sense has ever felt what endless and with a mouth of flesh never expressible bliss God has prepared for those who truly love Him—that is, love Him actively!
I Myself certainly possess within Me from eternity the highest bliss in the fullest enjoyment; for My love, My wisdom, and My most infinite power eternally offer Me within Myself the inexpressibly most blessed full enjoyment of My divine, most perfect life. And I, as your Father, tell you: What I have, you too, as My dearest children, shall have! For where on this Earth is there a father who would not gladly share all his joys with the children whom he loves more than himself, and who at last has his greatest joy precisely when he has gathered his dear children around him full of joy?
Do you perhaps think that the Father in heaven will have less joy over His children who love Him above all? Oh, by no means, but an infinitely greater joy! Therefore He will also prepare for them infinitely greater joys than an earthly father of the very best heart could ever prepare for his children; for your Father in heaven truly has the means for this in an infinitely and eternally wonderfully varied abundance.
Therefore gladly and with great zeal do also what I have not commanded you, but only advised you as a Father, and you will soon perceive within yourselves what reward awaits you!
Tell Me yourselves, and think about it rightly: Would not a merchant who knew that, for an affordable price, he could buy one of the very greatest pearls of certainly inestimable value be the greatest fool if, even though he did not possess enough money, he did not at once sell all his goods of little value and with the proceeds buy the priceless pearl? For the priceless pearl is in the eyes of men inexpressibly more valuable than all his former goods put together.
And see, so it is also with the value of the rebirth of the human soul in its primordial life-spirit from Me! Is this not worth a true human being renouncing all the treasures of the world and striving with all his powers only for the greatest pearl of life, namely the rebirth of the soul in the primordial life-spirit? Or is it not better to care for the eternal life of the soul than for all the perishable treasures of the world, which pass away and decay and very nearly never return completely to the eternal, clear life of their souls?
It is indeed true that during life on this Earth the soul appropriates from its flesh what is akin to it and transforms it into its own being, and after the body has completely fallen away it gradually appropriates from the ether of decomposition what corresponds to it for its clothing; but that is not a treasure of life of a soul, but only a peculiarity of life of every soul founded in My order, which can never be counted as merit to it, because that is solely a matter of My care.
But this too is to be accepted as something certain and true: in a pure soul that has lived according to My will, more of its earthly body will pass over into it than in an impure and sinful soul; for if a chaste body was already here an adornment of the soul, it will surely be so all the more in a transfigured spiritual state.
Yet even this does not belong to the actual merit of life of the soul, but is likewise an arrangement of Mine rewarding the soul; and it would itself be vain folly if a soul wished to concern itself for even a moment with this earthly treasure of its own, which remains with it in the beyond and yet belongs to its own self. Indeed, such concern would be comparable to that of very foolish parents who care above all whether their children will receive an exceedingly beautiful and pleasing form, and how they are to bring about the fulfillment of their vainly foolish wish, but do not consider that growth and formation depend solely upon the will of God and that no human being can change anything about it.
For every soul, therefore, only one thing is necessary: that it seek and find within itself My kingdom of life in the little fundamental chamber of the heart of life; everything else will in any case be given to it by Me as a free addition.
Therefore I have already told you several times that you should not anxiously worry about what and where you will get something to eat and drink and with what you will clothe your body, but seek first within yourselves My kingdom and its truest righteousness! Everything else will be added to you; for the Father in heaven knows what you need for your earthly maintenance.
If today you work and eat and drink, then for the time being you have sufficiently cared for the day of labor. It would therefore be vain, on the day of work, already to worry about the next day; if you live to see it, it will bring its concerns for you with it. For only the day on which you still live and work has been charged to your account by Me; the coming day still rests in My hand and has not yet been granted to your account. It is therefore foolish in an earthly sense to worry today already about tomorrow; for it depends purely upon Me whether I allow a human being to live to see the coming day or not.
Once a householder and owner of large lands and herds worried so much in advance that, in order to increase and secure his earthly wealth, he had new barns, stables, and large, solid grain bins built and, for greater security, had a strong and high wall erected around the new buildings. When everything was finished, he said: ‘Ah, now my heart, so full of care, will be at ease; for from now on I shall be able to live on calmly with my great possessions, without worry and grief!’ But while he was still comforting himself with such words, a voice sounded like thunder and said: ‘O vain earthly fool! Why do you now boast and console yourself as though you were the lord of your soul and your life? See, this very night your soul will be separated from your flesh, for which you have cared so much. What then will all your great worries, efforts, and labors profit the soul?’ The man was frightened and recognized that he had cared very little for his soul, and died soon after this announcement.
Now ask yourselves what use all the man’s many worldly concerns about worldly things were to him! Would it not have been wiser if he had cared rightly and well for his soul and had found within himself the kingdom of God, as many of the ancients also found it within themselves, and even Gentiles, as you were able to observe in the seven Egyptians?
But by this I do not mean to say that, according to My will, a true human being should perform no earthly work at all! Oh, far from it; for bodily idleness is the begetter and nourisher of all vices! On the contrary, every human being should be very diligent and active and eat his bread in the sweat of his face.
Here it depends only upon the intention with which a person is active and industrious. Whoever is careful, active, and industrious as My friend and brother Lazarus is, also seeks My kingdom and its righteousness within himself powerfully and effectively, and will find it, just as he has already found it for the greater part—and you too, My dear Mark. Therefore be glad and cheerful; for you have already made the great pearl your own and will be of capable support to your brothers.
But now let us rest a little, for I see along the road that leads here from the west several of those disciples returning whom I sent out from Emmaus; they will soon be here, and we shall hear how things went with them.”
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The Causes of Pain Before Death
Jesus Christ: “In that I Myself cannot say you are entirely wrong; for I too am by no means in agreement with the ordinary way in which human beings die. But what can I do if human beings prepare for themselves so bitter and unpleasant a manner of death? If people lived only according to the order most clearly revealed to them from the very beginning, there would not be a single one who could complain about the bitterness of death.
The ancient patriarchs all died an easy and wholly gentle death; for when the angel called them, their souls left the body with great joy. From childhood to advanced age that body had endured no pains, but had mostly remained strong and healthy, and the final bodily death was not a consequence of great suffering and pain either, but occurred only at the ever-longed-for call of an angel, after which the soul freely and without any compulsion stepped out of the body, while the body, without the slightest pain, in a sense fell asleep.
But when human beings began to live more and more according to their own inclinations and increasingly gave themselves over to unchastity, fornication, and other indulgent pleasures that stupefy the senses, they themselves corrupted their healthy nature, became weak, wretched, and sick, and their bodily death naturally had to assume a different character.
If you take a knife, cut yourself somewhere in the flesh, and feel pain, can you, with sound reason, blame the Creator for that? Or would you perhaps say: ‘Why did the Creator not give man an insensitive body?’ But I tell you: If your body were completely insensitive, how could it then be alive? Only a completely dead body is also completely insensitive!
Suppose a person, at least outwardly, had an insensitive body, as his hair is. What would very soon be the certain consequence in a careless person? Self-mutilations of every kind and sort, so that in the end human beings would no longer have a human form and would also be incapable of any work.
So that human beings at least cannot mutilate their outward form too much, sensitivity has been given them as a good guardian. Moreover, it follows of itself that a person who had no sensation of pain could also have no sensation of delight and bliss; for the one conditions the other, and one cannot exist without the other, indeed cannot even be conceived without it.
I know well that because of their great blindness human beings now, and already for a long time, suffer very much, especially in dying. This is, first, because for the most part they have no certain knowledge at all of the continued life of the soul after the death of the body and very many are already caught in the belief of the Sadducees; and second, because through their most disorderly way of life human beings have filled their body with all kinds of impure spirits, from which in time all kinds of evil and painful diseases must inevitably arise, diseases that also bring an early death in their train.
And for this reason I Myself have come in the flesh to this Earth, that I may show human beings the paths to walk on which, first, they again become truly and vividly aware that and how their soul, as their actual self, continues to live after the death of the body, and, second, that as long as they have to live on this Earth they may remain healthy and strong into advanced age, and their departure may not be painful and agonizing but joyful and supremely blissful. And so, as the Lord of life, I can give you the full assurance that whoever—understand this well!—will eat My bread and drink My wine will not see, feel, or taste death. In other words: Whoever lives according to My teaching will also be placed into its all-blessing effect. I think that you, My learned friend, will now understand this matter differently from how you understood it before?”
The scribe said: “Lord and Master, now I certainly understand the matter differently and better than before, and I thank You with all my heart for the light given to all of us also in this respect; for I consider it of the highest importance for a human being to know and finally also feel vividly what bodily death is about and by what means it can lose its ancient terrors, pains, and torments. For only through a certain and life-true awareness of all this can a person feel himself raised to the true dignity of a human being from God, and his animal nature sinks back into the dust of nothingness.
But a very weighty question now arises for You here, since You alone can answer it for us in a way valid for life. See, Lord and Master, we have now accepted Your teaching with full faith that convinces our whole being, and we shall also live and act strictly according to its most holy and true principles. But before this we have already spent a considerable number of years certainly not according to Your order and under all kinds of sins. On such occasions some impure spirits may also have crept into and rooted themselves in our flesh, as I now infer only too clearly from various illnesses I have already had to endure. Will these bodily spirits of disease still be able to be driven out completely through the active eating of Your bread and the drinking of Your heavenly wine, so that in the moment of my departure they will not oppress me with some torment; or, because of the sins committed, shall I in the end still have to feel and taste a little of the harshness of death?”
Jesus said: “If you live in such a way that your soul is completely reborn in its spirit, then that spirit will soon and easily deal completely with all the impure spirits still lodged in your flesh, and you will die a wholly blessed death even as regards the body. But if someone in general lives and acts quite earnestly according to My teaching yet secretly within himself still falls back into his old habits, then he will not be able here to attain the full rebirth of the soul in the spirit, and in the end, in all humility and patience, he will have to accept it if in departing he still has to struggle with some sufferings. For then the sufferings will be the fire through which the gold of man’s life is purified from many slags; for nothing spiritually impure can enter heaven, which means: the pure spirit from God cannot fully unite with the soul until the soul has forever banished from itself everything belonging to matter and its judgment. Whoever therefore wishes to depart this world in a blessed bodily death must take this well into account!
You should also be moderate in eating and drinking and not crave artificially prepared delicacies; thus you will long preserve the health of the body, and death in advanced age will be like the sweet falling asleep of a tired laborer in the true vineyard of God. The soul will then, blessed and clear-sighted, float away from the worn-out bodily covering and at once be introduced by many friends into the indescribable joys of the heavens, and it will be endlessly glad and cheerful that it has at last been delivered from this world and its misery.
Thus whoever will live and act perfectly according to My teaching will also be perfectly blessed with its blessed effects; but whoever lives and acts imperfectly will likewise reap the blessing accordingly. Have you understood this now, My friend?”
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The Fate of the Church and the Awakening of Humanity
Jesus Christ: “When the Son of Man one day returns, do you think, Simon Judah, that He will find faith on Earth? (Luke 18:8). Yes, just as in this time, He will find hardly any faith at all, and those who still believe in Him will be laughed at and mocked.
Yet there will nevertheless again be many who will not allow themselves to be blinded by worldly wisdom and will openly proclaim My word; and to those I shall come by day and by night, reveal Myself to them, protect them from the persecutions of the world, and also give them the gift of miracles, so that through love they may help the afflicted, the infirm, and the sick. And thus it will then become brighter and more consoling on Earth. Do you understand this prophecy?”
Simon Judah said: “Lord, when in time will such a thing happen on Earth?”
Jesus: “Simon Judah, because of your mighty faith I have given you the keys to the kingdom of God and called you a rock upon which I will build My church, which the gates of hell shall not overcome. You were to be a new Aaron and sit upon his seat. Yes, you will also be this by being, together with the other brothers, a spreader of My word.
But when after several hundred years this becomes known among the Gentiles, it will be claimed in Rome that you founded such a seat there. And the peoples who are forced to it by fire and sword will also believe the false prophets who say that you, as the first prince of faith, established such a seat in Rome and from it rule in My name over the whole Earth and its princes and peoples. But see, that will be a false seat, from which much calamity will be spread over the wide Earth, and hardly anyone will then know where you established the true seat—the seat of love, truth, living faith, and life—or who your true successor is.
Such a false seat will indeed endure for a long time, far beyond a thousand years, but it will not live to be two thousand years old. And now reckon, if you can reckon!
When the false seat has become rotten and no longer has any support, then I shall return, and My kingdom with Me. Then you too will come with Me to Earth and be My witnesses before those among whom we shall still find true and pure faith.
But in that time a great purification will also be needed, so that human beings may once again recognize Me and believe in Me alone. Yet what I have now revealed to you in confidence, keep silent about for the present. The time will come when such things will be proclaimed aloud from all the housetops.”
…
“When such a condition has arisen among human beings, then it will also be time to give them what they lack; or only in such a time shall I again come to human beings in this world and do in general what I now do in particular before only a few witnesses. I now place the seed in the soil, and thereby I do not bring human beings peace, but only the sword for strife and for great struggles and wars.
Only the individual person who accepts My teaching and lives according to it will find within himself the light, the truth, and the true peace of life, although in doing so he will have to endure many struggles and persecutions with the world for the sake of My name, as all of you will also experience in yourselves. But when I come into this world a second time, then the fermenting, fighting, and persecuting among the peoples of the Earth will also come to an end, and the primordial relationship of human beings with the pure spirits of the heavens will become normal and lasting.
From what has now been said and shown to you, you will easily recognize and see why it is permitted that in time, beside the small and true seat of Aaron upon which I now place you, a false and long-enduring one will rise in the midst of the Gentiles, and how and why false prophets and teachers are even permitted in My name.
But you and your true successors are not to heed it when you hear from the mouths of the false ones the cry that Christ is here or there. For never again will I take up residence in a temple built by human hands, but only in the spirit and in the truth of those who seek Me, beseech Me, believe in Me alone, and thus also love Me above all things; their heart will be My true dwelling-temple, and in it I shall speak to them, teach them, draw them, and guide them. Remember this especially well for yourselves, so that when all this comes to pass in this way you do not take offense, but remember that I already showed you all of it beforehand together with its reason.”
Simon Judah then said: “Lord, from this we now clearly recognize Your order, which alongside the fullest freedom of will of the people of Earth cannot take any other course than the one You have now, and at other times too though not so openly, shown us. But for humanity in general there are still no golden fruits of life in sight for a long time. Yet since the matter must once be so in order finally to transform this Earth into a true school of life for Your children, then let it be as Your wisdom permits.
We, however, will do everything possible to sow as much as we can of the living seed of the word into the heart-soil of human beings, so that from it the greatest struggles between light and darkness among humanity may develop as soon as possible. All graves shall open, and even to the dead Your Gospel shall be preached, and the sea shall deliver up to the great light the dead whom it has swallowed. I do not mean here the bones and their flesh long since decayed, but the souls; to them too Your word shall be proclaimed in the spirit.”
Jesus: “You have spoken well and rightly. What is now happening here in the material world will truly not be withheld from the spirit world, which until now is still greatly stunted. But there are now very many human beings who, while alive in the body, are buried in the graves of the night of life at the deep bottom of the great sea of delusion; to these you will indeed preach the Gospel, and then many will come forth from their old graves into the light of life, and that sea will release its captives.
When this happens on a great and general scale, then the great and universal day of redemption will also begin to dawn brightly for all inhabitants of the Earth. But the work is great and difficult, and there are still few true laborers; therefore strive above all that their number may soon become great. Every laborer in My vineyard of life may also expect a great reward according to his diligence and zeal. Here on this Earth it will indeed always be meager for your body, as it has been until now, but all the greater and richer for soul and spirit.
For the goods of this Earth are only an appearance and resemble exactly those that many a person possesses in a dream. The small difference consists only in this: the possession of dream-goods deceives the human soul for a somewhat shorter time than the possession of outward goods in this material world. But both pass away, and after their passing everything will stand before the opened eyes of the living spirit only as an appearance; the spirit alone will then be able to give reality to all appearance in the truest state.
Therefore let everyone strive above all only for the possessions of the spirit, which are light, truth, and life in the soul. Whatever the body needs in right moderation will on this Earth fall to every faithful laborer in My vineyard almost of itself; for surely I know best what a human being needs also in every bodily respect. Have all of you now understood Me well?”
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The Nature of Truth
At this the innkeeper and his son again thanked Me for this instruction, but at the end he said: “That a human being can be freed from every delusion and deception only through truth is certainly in and of itself a great and holy truth; yet very many wise men among all the peoples known to us have constantly asked after truth, have diligently sought it, and have not been able to find it, and no one has yet been able to establish completely and show intelligibly to human beings what truth is. And so, dear Lord and Master, I would now like to hear from You what, at the deepest foundation, truth is; for You will surely be able to give us the best explanation of it. Only when a person knows what truth is, and how and where he can find it, can he also take it into himself as the guiding rule of his life and through it free himself from every delusion and deception. What, then, is the full truth, and how and where do we find it?”
Jesus said with a friendly countenance: “Look at Me and hear well what I shall now tell you: God, the One and only True One, is truth. Whoever has found God, the only True One, has also found the truth that will make him free and fully alive. But if a human being has found God, recognized His faithfully revealed will, and lives and acts according to it, then the human being himself has inwardly become truth; and if a person is that, then he is already free and has advanced from the death of the world and its matter into life from God.
I do see in you another question, one that is not as easy to answer as the one I have already answered; nevertheless I shall also find an answer understandable to everyone for your new question, which you have not yet spoken.
Your unspoken question is this: ‘It is quite right that God alone is truth, and whoever has found God has found the truth that can make him free; but where is God, who is He, what is His wholly true will, and finally: how do I find God, and how do I recognize Him so that I know it truly is He?’
Yes, see, My dear friend, to answer this question in full light is truly no difficult matter for Me; but for you it is another matter to understand the answer in full light. Yet let us try.
See, God is a most pure and eternal Spirit. This eternal Spirit is the purest love and thus eternal life itself. Love, however, is a fire and in itself a flaming light, and all this is truth.
In God, as the eternal primordial ground of all being, there is also the most perfect self-awareness, the highest intelligence, wisdom, and power; and if it were not so, nothing would ever have been created, for what is in itself nothing can never form itself into something.
In God, then, the highest intelligence and the most luminous self-awareness are eternally present and active. And if it were not so, who could have given angels and human beings a life with intelligence and self-awareness? Or is it possible to give someone something that one does not oneself possess? Can a mute and crude force give perfected life?
In your life you have often seen all kinds of blind and mute forces rage and storm against one another; but have you ever seen a hurricane, by the development of its greatest might and violence, put together even the poorest sheepfold or pigsty? Or has a lightning bolt, when it struck from a cloud into the ground, ever produced anything other than the most disorderly destruction?
Now consider all those mute forces and powers, and as products of their crude activity you will never discover in them anything from which even the smallest spark of intelligence or reason could in and of itself be perceived. Yes, a wise investigator will discover even in the crudest working of blind and mute forces and powers a certain order and a wise plan; but that is not the property of the blind and mute forces and powers, but the property of God, who from His own infinitely wise power of will brings such forces into action in order to achieve a good purpose for one or another part of the Earth.
Consider the plants, the animals, and especially the human being, and in everything you will find the greatest order, a wisely arranged plan joined with the best fitness for purpose. None of these living things could ever have given all this to itself, since before existing it simply was not there at all. But since they now exist and their existence surely points to a supremely wise Author, it is clear that only His highest intelligence, His power, and His most perfect self-awareness could have called such manifold beings from Himself into existence.
Even in his purely natural sphere of life, while still spiritually undeveloped, the human being already possesses a luminous, far-reaching intelligence, from which reason and understanding unfold as a tree from a seed, and by means of them he soon brings into existence very noteworthy and well-ordered works.
Who besides God could give, preserve, and perfect in the human being—whose body is already a most artful organism and a life-machine arranged with supreme wisdom—intelligence, self-awareness, reason, understanding, love, and a completely free will with the corresponding power of action? Friend, if you reflect with even some clarity upon what I have now presented to you only very briefly, you will also very easily find in it the natural path upon which a human being, if he only earnestly wills it, can find God and with Him eternal truth. And if he enters this path with all love for Him whom he seeks, he will also find Him; and once he has found Him, the One found will immediately make His will known to him.
If the human being then acts according to this will, it will also become ever brighter and more luminous in his soul, which through love for God, whom it has found and recognized, unites itself ever more closely with the Spirit from God.
And now see: when this condition has arisen in a person, then he himself has become truth, because he has found truth within himself; and with this you will now understand what truth is, how it is to be sought, and how and where it can always be found with certainty.
But if you have found truth in this way and thereby also become free and pure, then everything surrounding you also becomes truth, purity, and freedom; for to the truthful all is true, to the pure all is pure, and to the free all is free. For the present you need nothing more. Now ask yourself whether you have indeed understood all that I have just set before you.”
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True Forgiveness of Sins
Jesus Christ: “Whoever sees well can indeed say to his brother, if he notices a splinter in his eye: ‘Brother, allow me to remove the splinter from your eye.’ But one who carries not only a splinter but a whole beam of sins and follies in his own eye should see first how he may draw the beam from his eye. Only when his eye is clean can he also help his brother remove the splinter from his eye.
Whoever teaches his fellow human beings should not teach them merely through wise and finely fashioned words, as the Pharisees and other false prophets also do, but rather through his deeds and works; then he will move his fellow human beings to true and living observance. But if he teaches one way and another yet himself acts contrary to his teaching, he is like a wolf in sheep’s clothing who gathers the shortsighted and credulous sheep around himself and gives them wise teachings only in order to make them compliant for his jaws.
Will it benefit such a wolf of a teacher if, secretly recognizing his wrong, he says to God: ‘Lord, forgive me my sins, for I have often sinned against Your sheep,’ yet still remains the same old wolf? Oh, such asking and praying will profit him nothing, for he is still the old wolf. Let him put off the wolf completely and become a lamb; then he has forgiven himself his sins, and they will then also be forgiven him in heaven.
If your brother insults you and has done you harm, then through the love in your heart you have the fullest right to forgive your brother the sins committed against you; and if he then also comes to you in a friendly way, thanks you for your love, and earnestly promises to do you good, his sins committed against you are also forgiven him in heaven, even if you do not allow him to compensate you.
But if the brother does not recognize the wrong he has done you and persists in his wickedness, then your love and patience will indeed be highly credited to you in heaven, but the brother’s sins will remain upon him until he completely forgives them himself, which can happen by fully recognizing them as sins, abhorring them in himself, laying them aside completely, and committing them no more.
But if this is so and cannot possibly be otherwise, how can some of you Essenes say to human beings: ‘We have been chosen by the Most High God as His representatives for human beings and have the right to forgive, as valid also in heaven, the sins and vices confessed to us, if the confessor performs the penances imposed by us and makes this or that sacrifice’—the latter being what is chiefly looked to!? If I Myself cannot forgive any human being’s sins beforehand until he has forgiven them himself in the way shown to you, how then can you, in God’s stead, forgive human beings in return for sacrifices those sins which they never committed against you?
Yes, as true physicians you may quite earnestly require those people who seek help from you to confess to you all their sins and defects, so that you may then give them right counsel for their further life and, through exact observance of it, procure for them the desired healing of soul and body. Yet even in this case you are not sin-forgiving representatives of God, but only helpful brothers and friends of fellow human beings suffering in body and soul; all their sins will then also be forgiven in heaven if, by following your counsel exactly, they have completely forgiven themselves their sins.
Therefore, if in future you wish truly to help human beings, teach them above all how they must first help themselves; for without earnest self-help going before, no help from God is possible either. This applies especially to the human soul that has become weak and sick through all kinds of sins, and often already entirely dead; by virtue of its free will and right understanding it has been entrusted by God to itself and must cleanse itself of all the dross of matter and its judgment, so that it may then also be purified and strengthened by the spirit.
Therefore put away all your old follies and empty deceptions and make yourselves free of them; thereby cleanse your souls, and I shall then also be able to say to you: ‘Now you too are clean before Me.’ I shall then strengthen you through My Spirit, which will animate you to higher power of action and draw you into becoming true and perfect human beings.
But since you now know this and have heard it from My mouth, act according to it as well; otherwise these My truest and most living words will profit you just as little as your empty, untrue, and dead words ever profited human beings.
My words are indeed the power and life from God Himself, but they become a share of your life only through your acting according to them. Therefore be at all times true doers and not mere hearers of the word that I have spoken to you; then all your many sins will also be forgiven you in heaven, and I shall then always be able to help you. Have you understood this well?”
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Fear of God and Love for God
Jesus Christ: “Very well, then hear Me and open your eyes and hearts wide.
I Myself, who am now speaking with you, am the One whom the prophets proclaimed to human beings. According to My eternal counsel it pleased Me to come Myself as a human being, with flesh and blood, among the human beings wandering and languishing in the ancient night of sin, as the brightest and life-giving light, and to redeem them from the hard yoke of judgment and eternal death.
But I did not come only to the Jews, who from the primordial beginning were the people of the one true God and still call themselves so, although very many of them through their evil deeds have long since become a people of hell; I also came to the Gentiles, who likewise descend from the same first human being of this Earth, but in the course of time allowed themselves to be so enticed by the attractions of the world that they fell away from the one true God, no longer recognized Him, and then made gods for themselves from dead and perishable matter according to their pleasure and liking, and afterward venerated and worshiped them, as is still very much the case at present and as you well know.
So that the Gentiles too may recognize the eternal and most living truth as existing in God alone, I therefore also came to the Gentiles and give them back the light of life they had long lost by their own will, and with it also eternal life.
I Myself am the light, the way, the eternal truth, and the life. Whoever believes in Me and lives according to My teaching already has eternal life within himself and will never see or feel death, even if according to the body he should die a thousand times; for whoever believes in Me, keeps My commandments, and thus loves Me above all things is in Me, and I in spirit am in him. But in the one in whom I am, there is also eternal life.
And so I have also shown you the one true God, as I promised you before. But now examine yourselves as to whether you also believe this. Yes, you now believe it; but remain in this faith as true heroes and let no one turn you away from it again, then you will live, and the power of My will will be and remain in you. Thus let it be and remain.
When I had spoken this to the Gentiles present, they were seized by the deepest shudder of reverence, and no one dared to speak a word.
But I said in a friendly voice: Compose yourselves, children! Do I, as the truest Father of all human beings, look so terrible that such a shudder now seizes you before Me? See, surely nothing is impossible to Me, for in Me are all strength, might, and authority in heaven and on Earth; but this I cannot do: that I should not be what I am, and you not be what you are. I am once and for all the One who I am, was, and shall be from eternity to eternity, and you too will be and remain the same. If I now call you My dear children, then you are fully of the same standing with Me; and if you live and act according to My teaching and thus according to My will, then truly you will be no less perfect than I Myself am and will be able to work the same signs that I work. For what joy can imperfect children give a perfect Father? Therefore let go of your excessive awe before Me, and instead take up full trust and love toward Me, and you will be far more pleasing, agreeable, and precious to Me.
Truly, whoever loves Me has no need to fear Me. For those who fear God too greatly have, first, never yet rightly recognized Him and their heart still stands far from His love; and second, such overly fearful children also stand in the self-caused danger of going astray in their faith and recognition, because fear weakens their courage and will to draw as near to Me in the heart as is ever possible, and thereby to be enlightened by Me in all truth of life. If you have understood this, then let go of your fear before Me and embrace love and the fullest childlike trust in Me.”
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The Condition for God’s Personal Revelation
Jesus: “For the present, of course, you must only believe all this; but if your faith becomes alive through works, then through living faith you will also pass over into seeing, feeling it for yourself, and the deepest recognition that convinces you inwardly; and this is far better for the human soul than first accepting something as convincingly true which, through its own searching and investigation, it has laboriously acquired as a truth along the path of experience.
Such a seeking and diligently investigating soul is certainly worthy of its reward, since every laborer is worthy of his wages; but better is a soul that, when it hears the truth—I say—from the mouth of God, believes and acts accordingly. For through this it unites My Spirit with itself through love, and My Spirit can give it, and does give it, in one hour more of the most luminous wisdom than it could acquire in a hundred years along the path of its own investigation. Yet for that reason a devout believing soul should not set aside proper seeking and investigation either. Every human being should examine everything he hears from human beings and retain what is good, which is also always true; but what is easily recognizable as revealed to human beings by Me Myself needs little examination, but only belief and action according to it, and its living effect will soon begin to make itself very noticeable to him.
To whoever believes in Me, does My will, and loves Me above all things and his neighbor as himself, I Myself will come and faithfully reveal Myself to him. In the future, however, it will be such that in the end everyone who truly thirsts for Me as eternal truth will be taught by Me; for I, as the truth in the Father, am as a Son, while the Father is the eternal love in Me. Whoever, therefore, is drawn by love or by the Father also comes to the Son or to the truth.
Therefore it is better to draw near to Me through love than through investigating pure truth. For with love the Spirit of truth also comes unfailingly, just as light comes with fire once it has risen into a living flame; but if someone sees some distant light and runs after it, he will surely have longer to labor until he reaches the place of the light, there also to be warmed into life by the living flame of the light.
Whoever truly seeks God must seek Him in his own heart, thus in the spirit of love in which all life and all truth are hidden, and in this way he will easily and soon find God and His kingdom; by every other way it will be difficult, and in this world often he will not find Him at all.
Scripture also says that a human being should worship God. But how is he to worship God if, first, he has never known God otherwise than at most by hearsay and scarcely even believes that such a God exists, and, second, he does not remotely know what worshiping God means? Yet God, who is Himself eternal and purest love, surely cannot take pleasure in that lip-prayer in which the heart is far away.
To worship God means to love Him always above all things and one’s neighbor as oneself. And truly to love God means to keep His commandments most faithfully under life conditions that may often appear ever so adverse, which God, when according to His love and wisdom it is in any way necessary, allows to come upon one or another person for the strengthening and exercise in life of the soul too strongly drawn toward matter; for God alone knows every soul, its nature and character, and also knows most clearly and best how it can be helped onto the true path of life.
God is in Himself the highest and purest Spirit, because He is the purest love, and must therefore be worshiped by those who truly wish to worship Him in spirit and in truth, and this without ceasing throughout the whole of life, as all the angels in heaven also do eternally.
If lip-prayer were a right worship pleasing to God and God required it from human beings and angels, then He would be as weak, vain, and unwise as a blind and haughty Pharisee who wants to be honored by everyone above all things and to rule over all. For if a human being were to pray to God with his mouth day and night, and that without ceasing, where would he obtain the time for other necessary work and how would he provide the necessary bodily food for himself and his own? Unfortunately there are now among the Jews a multitude of such fools, and there will also be in the future, who worship God with almost endlessly long lip-prayers and suppose that this is true divine service and that God takes pleasure in it, especially when such lip-babbling is accompanied by all kinds of ceremony.
But truly I tell you all: Wherever I am worshiped and honored by human beings in this way, there I shall immediately turn My face away and never regard such worship and veneration, precisely in order to show foolish human beings in practice that such worship and veneration are a true abomination before Me and that I never heed them; and least of all those performed by priests for money, because the one praying, who has been paid for it by another, merely mutters such a prayer for appearance’s sake, mostly without any faith, while the one whom the prayer is supposed to help is himself too lazy to bend his knees before God and therefore prefers to let others pray for him.
Therefore love God above all things and your neighbors as yourselves; do good even to those who do evil to you; in this way also pray for your enemies and likewise intercede for those who hate and curse you; and do not repay evil with evil—except in the utmost necessity, in order if possible to set a true evildoer thereby from the path of vice onto the path of virtue. I shall look upon such true and living worship with the most heartfelt fatherly pleasure and truly leave none of your petitions unheard. But mere lip-prayer without heart and fullest faith I shall never regard or hear. I have now faithfully shown you the right path of life; walk and act in this way, and thereby you will be and remain in Me and I in you.
But whoever has Me within him through his love for Me and from that for his neighbor will not walk in the night of judgment and of the soul’s death, but continually in the brightest day of life.
And now tell Me, My dear son, whether and how well you have understood this. For if you have understood it rightly, you will also act rightly according to it and become full of light.”
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“Adam, Where Are You?” – An Important Question
Jesus Christ: “The question which God put to Adam after he had eaten of the forbidden fruit, namely: ‘Adam (or human being), where are you?’ still continues and will continue until the end of this world, as long as there are human beings who prefer to eat from the tree of knowledge rather than from the tree of life.
For the human being who eats from the tree of knowledge very soon loses God, himself, and his inner life, and no longer knows who he is, why he is here, or what is to become of him. Then his soul becomes full of anxiety and fear and seeks in the brain-intellect of its body the calming and comforting answer to its question: ‘Human being, where are you?’ But there always comes the same comfortless answer: ‘You are in judgment, which is the true death of the soul. In the sweat of your face earn your bread!’
What, then, should the soul find in the brain? Nothing but the images of this world lodged there, all of which stand much farther from what belongs to spirit and life than the soul itself. If the soul does not recognize the Spirit of life from God who always stands nearest to it, how will it then recognize His Spirit, often infinitely farther from it, in the images of the world in the brain of its bodily head?
From this complete inversion there necessarily arises of itself an even greater inversion, in which the soul imagines God’s being ever more distant and unreachable, and this continues until at last it loses Him entirely and then passes into Epicureanism or Cynicism. (Epicureanism = addiction to pleasure)
In this condition, in which most priests of every kind and class now find themselves, and especially the Pharisees, elders, and scribes, as well as the princes and kings together with their great following, the soul recognizes no truth any longer. A lie counts with it as much as, and even more than, the purest truth if it can only draw some earthly advantage from it; if some truth hinders it in this, it becomes hostile to that truth and flees it or persecutes it with fire and sword.
In such a condition of the soul there is no longer any sin for it either, and a human being who has some worldly power at his disposal then does whatever pleases him and flatters his senses; and woe to any righteous person standing in the truth of life who goes to such a powerful man and says to him: ‘Why are you an enemy of truth, and why do you practice the most crying injustice among human beings, who on this Earth are no less than you, blind fool?’
But look around you now in the world and see whether it is not so everywhere. And who is to blame for it? I tell you: nothing other than the ever-increasing eating from the tree of knowledge.
I Myself have now come bodily into this world to the human beings who have turned too far away from the true goal of life and ask them once again: ‘Adam, where are you?’ Yet none knows how to tell Me where and who he is. So I now show them once more the tree of life and urge them to eat of its fruits and satisfy themselves with them.
Truly I tell you: Whoever eats from the tree of life will also attain the true life of the Spirit from Me, and then he will never again hunger or desire to eat from the tree of death. For whoever once finds himself in the life of the Spirit from Me also finds himself in all its wisdom; and through this the tree of knowledge is first blessed, and the soul will then recognize more in one moment than through its outward and vain intellectual research in a thousand years.
But when you find yourselves in the state of true life, you will also be able to work signs in My name and thus give everyone a testimony of the truth of My teaching whenever it is necessary. Have you, learned friend, understood this well now?”
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Addiction to Worldly Pleasures
Jesus Christ: “But if a soul, after it has received the pure teaching and also understands the truth well, thinks: ‘Ah, now I know what I rightly have to do for my salvation; but before I become fully active according to it, I still want for a short time to enjoy the attractions and sweetnesses of this world, since they are offered to me; for since I now know clearly and exactly the paths to spiritual perfection, it will surely not depend on the particular time when I choose to enter them in full earnest; once I enter them I shall certainly make progress.’ See, friend, then the soul begins to taste the attractions and sweetnesses of the world and soon also to enjoy them in full draughts, and thereby gives the matter of its flesh a considerable preponderance which its clear insight into the things of the spirit is able to overcome only with great difficulty and often not at all.
But because such a soul, as a result of its first folly, gradually sinks ever more deeply into matter, the original purely spiritual illumination also becomes ever dimmer. The soul falls into all kinds of doubts and in its material sluggishness no longer considers it really worth the effort to raise itself up and at least for a short time of only a few days or weeks make an earnest, self-denying attempt to convince itself whether there is indeed anything in the teaching revealed from the heavens for the attainment of the inner, true life.
Yes, friend, when such a soul once made sluggish by its very own folly then also sees people around it who through their initial zeal have raised themselves to inner perfection of life, this still makes no significant impression upon it and does not move it to self-activity. If it happens to be in a good mood, it lets the awakened people around it tell it about the wonders of the spiritual in the human being, and now and then the wish also arises within it to be itself what the perfected ones are; but immediately afterward the attractions of this world already enjoyed and still to be enjoyed act upon it with such power that it cannot resist them, and it thinks: ‘Yes, surely I am doing nothing bad if I do not immediately turn around completely. I still want first to see and try this and that in this world, and afterward I shall probably still have enough time left to follow in the footsteps of the perfected ones.’
And see, the descendants of such inwardly lukewarm and sluggish human beings think, resolve, speculate, and calculate even more in this way, become completely dark in spirit, and also become evil if they are merely reminded of what they, as human beings, should do to attain inner perfection of life.
And thus from one generation of human beings to another the weeds of the night of souls grow and proliferate, as a result of their ever more awakened addiction to worldly pleasures and increasing sluggishness, to such a degree that nothing else remains for Me than to visit such human beings with all kinds of plagues and judgments in order to make them feel in themselves the vanity and evil of their worldly strivings.
When through all kinds of bitterest experiences they have been brought to the point that they themselves begin to feel a true disgust for the world and its vain attractions of pleasure, only then is it again time, as now, to show them through new revelations from the heavens the paths to the light of life, upon which many will then walk with all zeal. But far more who are sunk too deeply into the night of judgment and the death of the world will still remain and persecute all who wish to awaken them to the life of the spirit, until the judgments permitted over them sweep them from the Earth as storms sweep away chaff.
Yes, friend, from My side the relationship between spirit, soul, and body is already most perfectly and exactly balanced in every human being; only the folly of human beings, this ancient inherited sin, has turned the good relationship into a bad one.
Look at the ancient legend of your Prometheus and his self-created daughter Pandora. Who, then, is Pandora?
See, correspondingly represented in an image, it is the folly and craving for novelty and worldly pleasure of the human being, through which he is then bound to hard matter. Even if from time to time an eagle comes to him from the heavens and mightily admonishes him to detach himself from matter, it profits little; for scarcely has the eagle gone away for a while when in the soul of such a person the liver, as the symbol of his worldly desires, has already grown back completely, and the heavenly eagle can begin to consume it anew. Do you understand this good image? But look beside it at what Moses himself says in a clearer image about the first human pair, and you will find exactly the same thing in it.
But if this is so, see, then I am not to blame for the deterioration of human beings because I placed in the soul a small inclination toward the world, while at the same time on the other side I let a full light from the heavens come to it, with which it can overcome the small inclination toward the world with little effort. Do you understand this, friend?”
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God’s Judgment and Grace
Jesus Christ: “O you children of Adam! Why will you not rather become My children? O what efforts and strenuous labors it costs you to acquire Adam’s bread, dripping with the sweat of your hands, which in addition is soiled with the spittle of serpents and soaked with the venom of vipers, and with which in your excess you eat death into yourselves, first in time and then also eternally.
And My bread, spread with the honey of My love and soaked with the milk of eternally free life from Me, which you could enjoy in the highest fullness of all abundance and which would never harm you eternally, but would strengthen you and equip you with all might and power from Me eternally and already in time as well, if only you wished to accept it.
See, soon after My very greatest deed, which is the great work of redemption for you, this My bread was still very costly, and human beings could buy even a small portion of it only with their blood and bodily life offered to Me in return. This My bread then tasted bitter in the mouths of the buyers and was not yet spread with the honey of love and soaked with the milk of free life already in temporal life; rather, both the honey and the milk were added in due measure to the grieving buyers only in the realm of spirits. And see, nevertheless there were buyers in great multitudes.
But now, when I give it entirely free to everyone who only desires it, merely for the surely very small payment of your love, with honey and milk—see, now it is bitterly despised, and the great, friendly Giver, truly and surely filled with the very highest love for you, is scorned.
Therefore take note: I have now had the gates of My heavens opened wide. Whoever wishes to enter, let him come, let him come soon and come at once; for the great time of grace has come, and the new Jerusalem is coming down to all of you upon the Earth, so that all who love Me may take up residence within it, be satisfied there with the honey-and-milk bread, drink in full draughts the pure water of all life, and draw it in abundance from the eternal well of Jacob.
But however immeasurably great a grace the descent of this My great city will be for all My children, it will nevertheless also crush all the blind beneath its strong walls and grind all the deaf to pieces; for its greatness will occupy the whole surface of the Earth. And whoever does not see it descending and does not hear its rushing through the pure airs of the Earth will never again find a place on Earth where he may hide from it and escape its weight.
For see, the weight of its palaces will grind the mountains down and make them equal with the valleys, and I will set its dwelling-houses over the puddles and swamps; and all the vermin dwelling in them will be crushed into the ground by the foundations of the dwelling-houses of the great city of God, your holy Father in heaven and on Earth.
And the true Shepherd will call His sheep, and they will hear and clearly recognize His voice to all the ends of the Earth and will come and graze in all delight upon the broad pastures of the eternal love of the holy Father, which are the great gardens of the new holy city of the great King of all peoples who were, are, and shall be eternally. And these gardens will be the paradise lost through Adam, which I first found again and faithfully preserved for them as an eternal dwelling.
For this reason I have already shown you in full detail, down to the smallest parts, My great order of creation from eternity; I have shown you creation from the First to the Last and showed you the first human being in his first arising. I shall continue to show him to you up to his end, and I shall show you the great harlot and destroyed Babylon, and then lead you into My great holy city and give you there a lasting dwelling eternally, if you love Me as I love you—above all things.
Look at the heavens and look at the Earth. These will one day pass away bodily and will exist only spiritually; but every one of My words spoken to you will endure just as it comes from My mouth, bodily and spiritually, in all the might and all the power of holiness, eternally, eternally, eternally, amen!”
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