THE GREAT GOSPEL OF JOHN
VOLUME 5
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
Jesus in the region of Caesarea Philippi. (cont.) Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 16
- Chapter 109 -
On the self-judgment of man.
1
(The Lord) :)"Look at the mountains full of forests and shrubs. Behold, these absorb a suitable number of all the nature spirits (electricity, magnetic fluid) compatible with them. Go and deforest all the mountains and you will soon become aware of the most dire consequences. Thereby great masses of free, very crude nature spirits will begin to more and more fill the atmosphere above the whole earth. Since these do not find a suitable abode and sphere of activity, they will begin to cluster in great masses and, driven by their hunger and thirst (assimilative instinct), cause the worst, all-devastating gales and ruin entire countries to such an extent that in a hundred, often a thousand years nothing will be growing there but here and there a moss plant. Thus there are to this very day on the wide world places extending for many leagues which are as bare of vegetation as the desolate, barren limestone on the shores of the Dead Sea in Lower Palestine into which the river Jordan is flowing.
2
Well, is that perhaps My will? Oh no! Where men must have freedom of will and freedom of action so that they can become human beings also in spirit, I Myself do not interfere - no matter how foolishly they may act. All I do is allowing them to reach, unperturbed, that which they have so eagerly striven for as if their life's happiness depended on it. It does not make any difference to Me whether the consequences are good or bad. What they create they get. Although I know what will happen afterwards, I can - and must - not intervene with My omnipotence; for if I do that, man ceases to be a man. He is then nothing else but an animated machine and can be of no value forever, either for himself or for Me. For he resembles a writer who is not capable of writing any syllable himself, but if he should write nonetheless, a scribe must guide his hand from A to Z; and if he has written an essay in this way, he nonetheless does not understand it. And even if he has written a hundred thousand letters in this way, he is nonetheless just as little a writer himself as the stylus with which he wrote. Just as little the man of this Earth would be a man if the free will was not left thoroughly untouched and likewise his acting.
3
The will can surely be directed through all sorts of doctrines and laws; but neither a doctrine nor any law can prevent the free will from carrying out what it wants to do. If the will of man wants to adopt a doctrine and a law as the guideline for his actions, he will in any case direct himself accordingly without any inner compulsion; but if he doesn't want this, no power of the world and the heavens can force him "and neither must! For, as I said: Without free will man is no longer a man, but instead purely an animated machine, like the machines that the people will invent with time, which will perform the same artificial tasks that now hardly any person is in a position to do. But such a machine will nonetheless not be a human being, neither according to the form nor even less to the inner freely-working reality; for it has no free will and can therefore never perform any independent action. Whatever the human will has laid in it, it will perform, and never anything else.
4
But man can, out of himself, do whatever he likes, and no one can prevent him from doing it. Thus, man can do what he likes with the earth that carries and nourishes his body; and only the consequences will teach him whether his will was good or evil.
5
Therefore every human being has reason and as a consequence of that, intellect. He can become enlightened through doctrine, worldly laws and every kind of experience and then choose spontaneously what is good, right and true and determine his course of action accordingly. With all this he suffers no coercion, since he himself chooses freely what he has recognized as good, right and true.
6
But we can experience only too tangibly day by day from hundreds of cases that people nonetheless very often spurn all they have recognized as good, just and true mostly out of temporal interests, and act to the contrary. And from this proceeds the fact that the freedom of human will cannot be endangered or restricted by anything. And so it is very possible that as time goes by people will be able to invent great things and also affect the nature of the Earth, so that in the end it will have to be quite considerably damaged. The consequences of this will certainly not be anything pleasant and will seem to be a certain punishment for the wrongly used will, but not wanted at all by Me, but instead brought forth through the will of man.
7
If the people want another Deluge, they only have to dig up the mountains and they will open the floodgates of the underground waters! If they want to see the whole Earth in flames, they only have to destroy all the forests, and the spirits of nature (electricity) will multiply so much that the Earth will suddenly be clothed in an ocean of fire and lightning! Would it then be Me who want to destroy the Earth through the fire?! Therefore teach the people to be wise, otherwise they themselves will bring the curse of judgment upon themselves! But I know that it will happen, and nonetheless I cannot and may not act against it through My omnipotence, but only through My teaching "do you understand that?"