The colonel, wholly penetrated by Jonael’s compelling words of truth, says, ‘Yes, now everything is clear to me, and I abandon my plan! I shall carry out such a thing only when you call on me to do so; and as the head of this community appointed by God, you shall have precedence with me in everything. From now on I shall do nothing without your advice.’
Jonael then says, ‘That is quite good and worthy of the Lord’s pleasure. If someone is sick in body, bodily help should be given him; but if someone is sick in soul, help for the soul should also be given him according to the nature of the sickness.
‘Children’s sicknesses of the soul can best be healed through well-ordered discipline, in which the rod should not be lacking. But the sicknesses of adults’ souls are healed through wise and loving advice, through sound teaching and instruction, and through admonitions arising from pure love and warnings about the necessary evil consequences that must arise in the near future from freely retaining the soul’s weaknesses. If all this no longer bears fruit with very obstinate, that is, blind and deaf souls, only then is it time to subject such beings to more serious and severe treatment. Yet love of neighbor must still stand behind it in full measure; from this alone can the blessing of severer treatment arise.
‘But if those in charge act from wrath and hellish vengeance, all their effort is in vain! Instead of healing those sick in soul into true human beings, devils are begotten from them whose thirst for revenge no power can henceforth still.
‘For a time Satan can indeed be held in check by power and force from above. But if the Lord, on account of proud people—who in the end think they are able, through their power and wisdom consisting in inexorably tyrannical severity, to maintain the order they please—withdraws His power and removes Satan’s fetters, then overnight the power of those who consider themselves mighty is at an end. For the people made into pure devils by such misguided treatment will fall upon them like a swollen stream and destroy them as though they had never existed!
‘The death penalty has the worst effect of all! For what use is it to kill someone’s body if one cannot hold his soul and spirit captive? The actual strength for acting and working resides in the soul.
‘Whoever believes he has rid himself of his enemy by killing his body is struck with tenfold blindness! For only through this has he made a thousand invisible enemies out of one weak enemy whom he could see; they then pursue him day and night and harm him in body, soul and spirit.
‘Look at a war in which many thousands are not seldom killed as to the body. The victor now thinks he has rid himself of his enemies because, according to his blind idea, he had destroyed them bodily. But how enormously he errs! The souls and spirits of the slain then devastate crops of every kind and variety for several years through their direct influence on the earth’s weather. They thereby cause the inevitable rise in food prices; this causes famine, and famine all kinds of deadly epidemics and pestilence. In a short time the pestilence carries off more people than the number of enemy warriors he had killed. Thus weakened in the power his land is meant to give him, he must recruit warriors from foreign lands at high pay in order to survive. In this way he puts himself and his land in debt. And when, after several years, he has sucked his land and people dry and can no longer pay his debts and soldiers, he will soon be pursued from all sides amid many curses. His people, whom he conquered, will rise against him under the pressure of great distress, and external enemies will not let this opportunity pass unused either, but rise against him. And he, the celebrated victor, will no longer be crowned victor after such a struggle; rather, despair will seize him with a tiger’s claws and spiritually tear him apart down to his innermost fiber of life!
‘And look, all this is an effect of the enemies killed as to the body!
‘Therefore it is an ancient rule and custom that all those closest to a person dying as to the body reconcile themselves with him and let him bless them. For if he dies as someone’s enemy, the person who outlives him as his opposing enemy is to be pitied. First, the freed soul will torment the survivor’s mind without interruption through the formation of unbearably agonizing pangs of conscience. Second, it will direct all earthly circumstances affecting the survivor so that he will not easily prosper again!
‘But the Lord allows all this so that the offended souls receive the satisfaction they demand. Besides, it is immeasurably better for the survivor to be tormented in this material world for his deeds of pride than, after his body’s death, to fall immediately into a hundred thousand hands of hostile spirits, who would surely not treat him kindly, as he would still be entirely inexperienced in that world!
‘Therefore it is also exceedingly necessary to practice love and true friendship in this world, to do good rather than evil to any enemy, and to bless whoever curses me; for I cannot know when the Lord will call him from this world! If in the world he was simply my enemy in what were in a way small matters, afterward as a spirit he will become so a hundredfold in great matters.
‘David was from childhood a human being and a man according to the will of Jehovah’s heart; but he had made only one person his enemy, namely Uriah, and how severely, with the Lord’s permission, Uriah’s spirit had then avenged himself on David! And that is and always remains the inevitable consequence of a hostile action against a person contrary to God’s will.
‘Yes, it is quite different if the Lord Himself commands you, as He had commanded David against the Philistines, to strike with the force of war and destroy on earth enemies of God and humanity who have already become Satan’s. These immediately fall under a severe judgment in the beyond and can never rise against God’s arm, for they are humbled by the Lord’s power.
‘But it is quite different with those enemies whom you have brought upon yourself in the world without God’s command, through your unfriendliness, any pride of yours, or the most deficient administration of justice devised by human beings, of which it is already proverbial that the highest right is at the same time the highest wrong. Only after laying aside their bodies will these become your most irreconcilable enemies!
‘I give you a thousand lives, if I had them, if you can show me one happy person in the world whom an enemy has preceded into the other world! I have never encountered one. But I do know cases where the vengeance of a spirit that had become hostile to a household had extended to the tenth generation, and also cases where people most gravely offended in a land or region had afterward, as spirits, devastated that land or region for many years, or sometimes even forever, so that no person could any longer live there! Friend, however unbelievable this well-meant teaching of mine may seem to you, it is nevertheless unshakably true. And if it were not true, how could I ever have dared give it to you now before the face of the Lord and His angels? But if you still have any doubt about it, turn to the Lord, the eternal Author of all things, and He will give you fully valid testimony as to whether I have told you an untruth in even a single syllable!’