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 37 -
Raphael describes the nature of God.
Raphael says, "Dear friend, you have worked yourself into a hollow fervor against me a little too early! First let me speak a few words with you, and then it will become apparent if I am a match for you!
2
Listen, you have given me in advance a formal interdiction to burden you with no other god than only one which your reason favors! And see, I myself truly know no other than the One whom you have found with your reason! The only difference between the two of us is that you wish for such a God that I have the highest honor to really know personally, and at the same time also have the high honor to be His constantly most willing servant.
3
This one true God is pure love and only through love is He the most complete wisdom and through this wisdom almighty.
4
This God is at the same time the highest order, truth, justice and all light and life Itself, and all beings and things on this earth - the earth itself with all its spirits and elements, the moon, the sun and all the countless many other stars, which are nothing other than just immense terrestrial bodies, some of them ineffably many times bigger than this earth, which is a sphere like you have always seen the moon and the sun as spheres, from which the latter, the sun, is a million times bigger than this earth-, all these are works of one and the same God, who in His primordial essence is constituted exactly as your truly refined reason imagines Him!
5
He has knowledge of all the bad and false perceptions about Him and also constantly awakens people who get a true perception of Him; however, they are usually never really understood by the sluggish and blind people in this world, and these remain with their old familiar follies.
6
You certainly thought that such a real God could impossibly look at and tolerate people's abominations for so long. For Him, as the almighty master, it would have to be quite possible to knock on the head all the bad and false balderdash. In that you are basically not at all wrong.
7
I feel and think exactly the same way as you do, and that is why it is that much harder for me, because as a spiritual being, completely consolidated for a long time, I have the power through my will to transform into pure nothing for your senses all those mountains which tower there above the sea, in a moment if it came down to it; being able to do something and not being allowed to is certainly more bitter than wanting to do something and not being able to do it!
8
That in spite of the possessed power, one may not lay about one no matter how badly one longs to, stems from the fact that for every person in this world it comes down to that "as you noted quite well towards the end of your discussion with Cyrenius "a proper person should find himself and consolidate as a concrete life force, otherwise he will not be able to maintain himself for eternity as a free and independent being against the continual and hostile effect of the mighty forces! Even if you did not express yourself with my words, you still gave the same meaning.
9
You will realize now that with a person here on this earth where he has to consolidate his innermost life principle, without any foreign, forcible assistance, purely according to his knowledge and completely according to his most free will, one cannot lay about one with the heaviest beating. As long as people somewhere have found out for themselves such a life order under which a moral as well as physical existence is conceivable, one lets them exist in it for as long as they do not go over into too big degeneracy. If, however, this happens with any people the master of the heavens and earth is always there and leads the degenerated people back to the right life order, as it is now the case with the Jewish people."