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 94 -
Raphael explains the terms "Satan" and "Devil" to Roklus.
Raphael says, "My dearest friend Roklus, temper yourself; for these were indeed rock solid Pharisees, but they have now become our disciples and will see their mistake! And as far as the devil is concerned, you have too little knowledge to speak truly and validly about their influence on man. When you have a closer knowledge of that, you will also be able to speak about it!
2
You see, that which one calls 'Satan' and 'the devil' is the world with all its enticing splendor Certainly all matter that exists in the world is also only a work of God and there is something divine hidden in it; but besides it there is also lie, deception and enticement in it, from which grow envy, avarice, hatred, arrogance, persecution and all the other sorts of burdens which come from this without number or measure.
3
And you see, this falsehood, lie and deception is the 'Satan' when taken spiritually, and all the individual burdens that necessarily come from it are exactly that which we call 'the devil'; and every soul which has been given over to some of the countless burdens in their foundations is a devil in person and an active expression of one or other bad and evil thing, and in such a soul it is a drive that is hard to extinguish, only immediately to do something evil in the way in which it has established its life in the time of fleshly existence.
4
But since every soul also lives on after the death of the body and maintains itself in the region of this Earth, it is not seldom that a soul afflicted with such vices after its physical death enter the outer life-sphere of a still incarnated human who is naturally inclined toward the same vices. Since the soul hopes to find the necessary food within this man's outer life-sphere, its aim is to arouse evil in him too. But the propensity to vice can usually be traced back to a poor and neglected upbringing.
5
Such souls even often overpower the flesh of the person and thereby torture a sometimes weak soul. The Lord permits this, however, in order to improve such a leak in the soul; for thereby the tormented soul only then receives a true and living dislike against a reprobate weakness of the flesh and uses in the end every activity to become strong where it was once weak, for which the Lord's mercy comes to help at the right time.
6
You see, that is reasonably correct and true "which a Jew certainly should actually understand under the expression 'Satan' and 'devil'; but because he does not understand it, he considers by 'Satan' and 'devil' a spiritually personified evil willpower, which finds great pleasure in turning the people off the path of walking in the order of God.
7
Alone, these contorted souls have no counter-divine intentions; for firstly they do not recognize God at the furthest distance, and secondly they are too blind, foolish and dumb to be able to form any sort of intention. For apart from themselves they do not recognize any need at all and act only out of pure selfishness. They draw towards themselves only what their selfishness desires and are highly distrustful among one another; therefore a joint power is never conceivable among them, and you are quite right in that their power is null and void.
8
It is in fact null and void for human beings once they have been completely absorbed into the love and the will of the Lord; consider however those beings who are still neither in nor out and assume that you weigh their spiritual and material attributes against each other on a set of scales without revealing any balance in favor of either side. It follows that in any matter of passionate concern to the soul, the addition of a demonic presence which is concealed within that same belief on to the materiality side of those morality scales, will tend to tip the balance to a highly significant degree towards the materiality side. Should this be the case, the soul will have a more difficult task to disentangle itself from the material and to interconnect with the spiritual.
9
But if the soul remains a while in matter, then gradually ever more like-minded demons hang onto the material life-scales, the advantage becomes ever more noticeable, the material therefore becomes ever heavier and the spiritual naturally minor. And see, then the 'devils' of the Jews or the 'demons' of the Greeks in the end can cause great damage to a soul in the time of its formation, without having had the actual will to harm it!"