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 83 -
Perfection of life and miraculous power through love of God and brother. True and false prophets.
1
(Raphael) "Suppose you wanted to give the eyesight back to a blind person through the power of the divine will within you, but you might at the same time doubt a little in its success, then that is already greatly mistaken; for the blind man will not achieve sight in this way. But if you are moved in the love for God most powerfully, this highest fire of love and life will not only animate your soul most powerfully, but instead it will spread spiritually far above your sphere of form with an irresistible all-power and there it will work in a very concentrated way wherever your divine will has naturally seized something will all wisdom and intelligence. If then the blind man is seized by your divine will of God and immediately placed in the focal point of the all-powerful love of God, of whom your soul is full, he must also stand there in an instant as perfectly seeing; for in the highest light and fire of love and life from God every death must give in, even that of an eye which has died to light, which naturally is as good as dead without light as the whole body without breath and pulse. Thereby then the awakening of a deceased person is made possible in an instant; for if the divine will which fills your heart and its wisdom are not against the reawakening of some dead person, you only need to place the dead person under the burning centre of your love for the Lord God and he will live again perfectly!
2
However you people also need a strong effort and constant practice; for one must make the heart highly flexible so that it can throw itself willingly into the highest measure of love for God at any instant. If it can do that, then the person is perfected as a person, and whatever he wants through God must happen! If you then, so armed, want to create a world, it must then be according to your divine will and according to the power of divine love, whose measure places your heart into a highest fire of life and your external sphere of life into the highest, far-illuminating and effective light of life. Whatever then your wise recognition through God dictates to your will, will also immediately come to pass through the substance of your most powerful light of the love of life streaming out into the form previously well-thought out and recognized by you, and in a few instants you will have a whole world formed before you which you can then even fix and maintain if you are in the purest full possession of the divine will and the divine love.
3
But naturally you cannot already from the very beginning achieve full possession of the divine will inside you, if you have not accepted God into your heart through the pure, true love that eliminate everything else in all its fullness; for if God is not fully within you, He cannot fully desire through you.
4
But it is not as easy to love God above all else through all your life powers than you think! First of all, you need a perfectly pure way of life according to Moses' commandments. Wherever this is destroyed through all sorts of disorganized mistakes in life (sin), all the powers that are essential for life necessarily suffer which thereby are materialized and thus made as good as dead.
5
A person crippled in life in such a way cannot possibly love God above all else through all his proper powers of life because such people often are more than two thirds dead. Such a person must then reanimate the defunct powers of life through often several years of the very most industrious self-denial of all his old passions and habits and so gradually cross over into the highest possible love for God, which is naturally no easy task for a person who has already become very worldly!
6
For if a quite healthy person makes a great effort while climbing a high mountain and things must seem very arduous to him, how much more then for gouty person who hardly possesses the ability to drag himself forward on crutches on the flat land! But if a gouty person nonetheless seriously wanted this very much to climb a high mountain, he would have to look around for a very healthy and strong leader above all, who could come to his aid; the gout sufferer would then certainly achieve the climb up the high mountain with much avail.
7
He would indeed come into great sweat, and that, the higher, the more so; but thereby he would free his old limbs of the gout and animate the dead parts again and so in the end he would climb the highest peaks of the mountain already fully healthily, certainly after a journey of many days and much effort. But what a fabulous resolution then would belong to this to head for the highest peak of Ararat But this would still be easier than for a very worldly person to climb the spiritual mountain, where it is said: perfect humility and total self-denial!
8
Indeed you are raising your eyebrows and saying to yourself: well, well, with these prospects only very few people will achieve the peak of the true perfection of life on this earth, and the miracles will in future continue to have a hard time! Yes, yes, you are not totally wrong; but in these days there are highly capable life leaders at hand, with whose help it is not too difficult a task to be led and accompanied as a person with gout in his soul with effective support to the highest peak of life on the spiritual Ararat.
9
Now it is an easy thing for everyone who has only some good will to work for all the perfection of life; for it so pleased the Lord not only to call very powerful leaders from the heavens to this Earth, in order to let the people be prepared, led and guided through them, but He Himself took on flesh and came to heal you gouty people and to show you His purest divine will, to teach you to love God above all else and your neighbor as yourself.
10
From now on there can no longer be any doubt for anyone to recognize the pure will of God and also to learn how one has to love God above all else, and how one can raise one's heart to such love. Now the paths are shown purely and whoever wants to walk along them cannot possibly get lost. But in the later years and centuries it will then become more difficult again to become friends with the purest will of the Lord; for besides the true prophets many false prophets will also rise up, they will do miracles in your old fashion and thereby teach very many quite false impressions of God and His purest will even with force. Then there will be a great sadness among the people of this Earth, and none will be able to serve the other as a suitable leader, because the one will say and teach: Look, here is the truth! And another will say: Look, here or there it is! But all who shout that way will not be truthful but false again and again.
11
Despite all this the Lord will still awake servants from time to time who will show the pure will of God to those who have a good will in the way that we are now showing you. Blessed are those who will live accordingly; for that way they will achieve what you can achieve now very easily! Only it will look a little sparse as regards miracles; for the spirit of the Lord will teach His own to be careful with them in order not to incite a whole army of false prophets against them and then have to fight against hell with the sword.
12
The Lord will wake the true prophets of truth always in complete silence and they will never make a noise or any perceptible sound like quite still water in the world; but those who make a sounds and a noise, the spirit of the truth and the word will not be in them.
13
The genuine prophets waked by God will also be in a position in all silence to perform miracles; but the world will not notice anything of that, instead sometimes the true friends of God for their own tranquil comfort only.
14
Now miracles happen for the sake of the obdurate Jews and heathens, so that in the end no-one can say that there were no signs from heaven at the revelation of this very new teaching. In those later days however the people will ask more for the full truth and not so much for the miraculous signs of evidence, about which the wise men will say that they cannot be persuaded that black is white so that they and the truth remain truth even without the miraculous signs.
15
You must now take from what I have said that I am not being to be feared despite all my great eating, and that between us there is actually not such a great difference as you imagined before, but instead that we stand more or less on the same step, yes, that you as already a person in the flesh have quite a significant step up on me! Tell me now whether I am still behaving beside you as an elephant in the company of a flea! Should I still, to spite you, leave you, or should I remain yet as a teacher among you?"