The Great Gospel of John
Volume 4
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
Jesus near Caesarea Philippi (cont.)
- Chapter 143 -
The Flood.
1
(The Lord:) "Yes, God's wisdom can surely become angry, when already developed and at least half matured people wantonly and wilfully defy God's order; but this is what God's love is for, which in its great patience knows how to find the appropriate means by which to guide people back onto the right road, whereby My final goal for mankind must always be reached, without forcing man, like a machine, through some almighty revenge on the part of God.
2
But even these means are not to be regarded as a consequence of divine wrath, but purely as a consequence of the wrong actions of man. Yes, God gave the world and nature its necessary and immutable must-laws in the right order; but man, too, has such laws as concerns his form and his physical being. Whenever man tries to rebel against this order and change the world he is not punished by a spontaneous wrath of God, but by the offended, severe and fixed divine order within the very things which must be what they are.
3
You are now asking yourself whether the Great Flood is also to be regarded as a natural and necessary consequence of wrong actions. And I tell you: Yes, it is! I awakened more than a hundred prophets and messengers, warned the people against their own actions which were contrary to the natural and the divine order; for more than a hundred years I seriously drew their attention to the terrible consequences arising from such actions for body and soul. But in their wilful wantonness they went so far as to not only in their blindness mock, but even kill, the messengers, thus engaging in a veritable battle against Me. However, I did not become angry or revengeful because of this, but allowed them to continue in their actions and experience the sad fact that foolishness and ignorance - being responsible for what they are - can by no means deal with the great nature and order of God as they please.
4
See, you are free to climb on the nearly five-hundred man-height high rock located there towards the south from here, and then throw yourself headfirst over the edge! According to the necessary laws of gravity of all bodies, such wantonness will most likely cost you your life. Ask yourself if this happened to you because of My wrath and My revenge!
5
There, towards the East, you see high, densely wooded mountains. Travel there with a ten times hundred-thousand men, set fire to them and burn all the forests; and the mountains will soon be completely bald. What will be the consequence of this? The many nature-spirits that will now be naked and deprived of all action will begin to rage and storm in the free air, and uncountable flashes of lightning, most violent cloudbursts and incessant hailstorms will ravage the land far and wide. All this is a natural result of the devastation of the forests. Say whether this has anything to do with the wrath and the revenge of God!
6
When ten times hundred-thousand men strive eagerly to level mountains and fill in great lakes or construct the broadest highways to facilitate warfare; when people escarp whole mountain ranges extending over several days' travel to a height of 400-500 fathoms or dig 200-300 fathom deep moats around the mountains, thereby tapping the earth's interior water-reservoirs so that the mountains begin to sink into the now empty great reservoirs and the water begins to rise so much so that in Asia it rages, like the sea, almost over the highest summits - add to this that, along with the mountains, also many hundred thousand times hundred thousand acres of the healthiest forest land were destroyed, on which occasion countless myriads of earth- and nature-spirits that formerly had been fully occupied with looking after the most beautiful and lush vegetation have suddenly become free and unoccupied -, ask yourself what an uproar the spirits might have started in the atmospheric regions. What storms and what enormous cloud bursts, what masses of hailstones and what an uncountable number of flashes of lightning have thereby been flung from the clouds to the earth for more than forty days, and what enormous masses of water must have risen over nearly the whole of Asia, and all this for natural reasons! Say, was that again God's wrath and His implacable revenge?
7
Moses described this event, like everything else, in the manner then in usage, that is, in metaphors - in which he, inspired by the Divine Spirit, always let My providence work -, which can only be presented by way of genuine and true correspondences.
8
Therefore, can you call God a God of wrath and revenge, because you and many others have never understood His many great revelations?