The Household of God
Volume 1
The early history of mankind
- Chapter 17 -
THE NEW DIVINE SERVICE - AND LIFE-ORDER
And when he had performed the Word of God conscientiously and returned to his people who had longingly waited for him, and there too performed the sacrifice as instructed by eternal Love and handed the empty vessel to Adam in the manner he had been commanded to do, eternal Love once more opened the mouth of the angel and spoke:
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"Abel, you most obedient son of My blessing, merciful love, I now ordain you priest and teacher of all your brothers and sisters and comforter of your parents. On every Sabbath, in the morning when the sun rises, you shall make an offering of the best and purest fruits, about which I shall later give you exact instructions. In the evening when the sun is setting you shall ignite them with the fire of love. I shall show you how it is naturally hidden in a stone and how one can always obtain it from there. And you shall not cover your head from midnight to the following midnight, so that it may be free to receive My great grace. But all your brothers shall uncover their heads only in the morning and cover them again in the evening. The sisters of your body, however, shall keep their faces and heads covered during the entire holy day. Only Eve may at midday look three times towards the altar of God.
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"Adam shall never cover his head, throughout his existence, for a sign that he is the father of your flesh and that you may at all times recognize him by his head and everywhere show him respect and love.
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"Woe betides him who would ever dare to oppose his father. Upon him I shall look with angry eyes, for the head of the father is like the holiness of God. Everyone can be granted forgiveness when he feels remorse in his heart, but the one who in any way offends against My holiness; shall be seized by its inextinguishable fire, which will consume every one of his tears of remorse, and he shall be destroyed forever.
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"And he who offends against his mother with an evil heart and opposes her love shall be ignored by Me when he is in distress. For the mother is like the love within Me, and whoever scorns it shall have a difficult time on the torrid ways of Jehovah.
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"Also, the brother who fights against his brother shall lose My grace, and My mercy will be far from him. And My heart shall be steeled against the one who disdains his sister.
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"For your brothers are also brothers of My love, and your sisters are a welcome sight to My love.
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"Therefore, honor your father and love your mother and be loyal to each other in all love, so that you can respect My name Jehovah and can love My Love and let yourselves be guided threefold by the great holiness of My Spirit on the day of My great holiness, to gain wisdom sevenfold for the six days of love and to act righteously before My eyes.
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"And now you, Abel, shall also teach your brothers various skills, each of them a different one, so that they may serve one another in love and give counsel in many fields of knowledge.
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"You shall teach your sisters how to produce threads from grass and plants and show them how to braid of them broad strips and make from them garments for their brothers, and then also for themselves, so that love may be upheld in its order.
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"To Adam, Eve and yourself I shall give garments from above, each of a different color: white for Adam, red for Eve and blue with yellow edging for you. No one else shall use these colors for his own garment, which shall be many-colored. However, there shall not be any black spot in it nor a rent, except when someone has sinned he shall in his repentance rent his garment, smear it with coal and scatter ashes on his head for a sign that he is a sinner before Me and has rent the garment of grace, since he smeared himself with the color of disobedience and death has come upon him.
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"But Cain shall desire his most beautiful sister, called 'Ahar' or 'the beauty of Eve'. With her he shall go out into the fields and make furrows in the earth with a tool he will find there ready for him. He shall sow in the furrows grain, which he will find there in abundance, and the fruit he shall call 'wheat'. When this has ripened, that is, when the grain has become hard and the ears brown, he shall carefully separate the grains from the ears, grind them between stones, then moisten the meal properly with water and knead dough from it. This dough he shall place on a flat stone that has been heated by the sun, leave it there for the third part of the day and then take it from there and give it the name of 'bread'. This bread he shall take, break it, give thanks to God, and then eat it with his wife Ahar.
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"And whenever he will harvest from his fields, he shall make a sacrifice to Me of the first tell sheaves.
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"If he remains faithful to Me I shall always be pleased and accept his offering from the earth. But if he will forget Me, his offering shall not be accepted and rise heavenwards, but shall remain on the ground at his feet.
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'Thus shall he live and multiply his kind, but before he does that he shall offer Me his heart three times and the heart of Ahar seven times. If he fails to do that he will have proved his faithlessness. He will become an evil man, and the serpent will live through him and continue to live in all his daughters who thereby will become beautiful outwardly, but all the more loathsome within. And they will corrupt all his sons and infect with their poison the children of My love and alienate My sons from Me.
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"And I shall one day eradicate his house from the earth. Tell him all that in no uncertain terms and remind him of My holy name Jehovah and of My Sabbath.
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"To you, My pious Abel, I shall show a flock of gentle animals and you shall lead them to pasture. And the name you will be giving them will be their proper name. When you will call them by their name, they shall recognize you as their shepherd and follow your voice everywhere.
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"In future your offering shall no longer consist in fruits, as it was after your return from the mountain of Jehovah, but you shall sacrifice the firstborn of your flock, which are the best and purest fruits, as already previously mentioned to you.
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"First you shall place dry wood across the hearth, then place the bloody sacrifice upon it, thereupon thank Me and ignite it, as I have shown you, with the fire which you shall take from the stone, as suggested by Me.
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"For a sign that your offering is pleasing to Me, the smoke will always promptly rise to the sky, as if it were in a great hurry. The ashes, however, which you shall cover with a stone, have to remain lying on the altar for three days. On the third day you shall go there and remove the stone from the ashes and, behold, a beautiful bird with shilling feathers will rise from the ashes and fly heavenward. Then a wind will arise and blow the ashes to all parts of the earth for a future resurrection of all flesh, which are the works of true love through the wisdom of the Holy Spirit that will be given to the children in the great time of times and to all the strangers who thirst for it.
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"You shall eat together in the morning, at noon and in the evening, but always very sparingly and in the fear of the Lord, after having given thanks to Him always before and after the meal so that the food may be blessed for you and not give you death.
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"Whoever will fail to do this will soon become aware of the bad consequences. The one who forgets it three times I will punish with a long sleep, but he who fails to do this because of his indolence shall become stout like an ox, fat like a pig and stupid like an ass, and the children shall mock him and laugh heartily at his disgusting shape. And if he shall wish to become once more like those who are always obedient, he will need to fast much and eat dry bread.
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"But he who will fail to do so because of his stubborn disobedience and scorn of this My easy command given out of My love for you, will be overcome with the appetite for lechery and fornication and he will easily sink into sin and through it into death. Then he will have to fight a hard battle against the powerful serpent that seduced Eve, and I shall not look at him until he has conquered his flesh in great repentance.
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"In the morning you shall eat fruits of the trees; at noon you shall eat from the tree of life, and in the evening you shall drink milk with holler which latter I will have gathered for you upon the branches of trees by many little creatures of the air of heaven, which you shall call 'Celie' (nowadays called by you 'bees'). The name 'Celie' means as much as 'heaven's care'. On the third day before the Sabbath you shall kill a lamb, clean it from its blood, roast it during the day over the fire from the stone and eat it happily in the evening.
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"Also Cain and his wife Ahar shall come to you and eat with you the flesh of the gentle animal. But on other days he shall remain in the field and there eat his bread with the fruits.
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"Now you know all that you need at present. And when a cold season will come over the earth for it's strengthening, I will send from above garments made from sheepskins for Adam, Eve and you. However, the skins of the sheep slaughtered for the evening meal your brothers shall gather, dry them in the sun and keep them to cover their bodies during the cold season after the sample I shall send you from above. When the skins have dried, they shall wash them seven times in fresh water, where upon the skins will become soft and clean and entirely fit for use."