The Household of God
Volume 1
The early history of mankind
- Chapter 88 -
ENOCH EXPLAINS ASMAHAEL'S SPEECH
Soon Enoch was once more awakened and began to address the following marvelous speech to all the patriarchs:
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"Listen, dear fathers! The Lord, God Jehovah, our most loving and holy Father, in His great mercy has looked graciously upon the sorrow of our humbled hearts and our folly, in which we have persisted stubbornly for about three hundred years, and will lift us once more out of the mire of our misery. But first of all it is necessary that every one ban the foolish distinctions of the regions from his heart and after that also in practice.
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"Hear, it has pleased the Lord, God Jehovah, our most loving and holy Father, to awaken Asmahael that he may show all of us the folly of the law if that is not closely connected to the divine order. All of us were outside of this order and, therefore, incapable of grasping it. For on the one hand we got ourselves entangled in the hard necessity of the law and were dead in all our words, thoughts, our will and, thus, also all our actions; on the other hand, we felt in our hearts the greatest need of the true freedom of life, without which life would not be life and could not become such forever.
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"We were a dual thing; we were both dead and alive. On the one side we were inconceivably close to the truth, but on the other side inconceivably distant from it. For law and freedom had formed for the understanding of our hearts an insurmountable gap over which we were unable to leap, neither from the law to freedom nor vice versa. Consequently, our own difficulty forced us either to see God Himself bound by His own law or to dissolve into a destructive, absolute freedom; and so we were dead on both sides.
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"I myself felt this within me and, notwithstanding the silent effort of my heart, I found it impossible to combine water and fire in one vessel. 'Because: I thought, the law of order is surely a law which God must observe as long as He wishes to behold and have permanent beings around and within Him. But how can he be free who has to observe laws?'
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"Then I thought again: 'But who can force God to any action? If He acts, He does it of His own freest and most holy will and can promptly undo it and completely destroy any of His works!'
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"And again I thought by myself: 'Where then does continuous preservation come from?'
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"Then love announced itself: 'I am the cause of all preservation!' and this was all it said.
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"So I thought again: 'If You are the cause of preservation, truly, then You are an eternal law to Yourself. How can You be free?'
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"And as I thought, so did also father Adam. Father Seth did not think like that, but he felt the insurmountable empty gap deep within his breast and sought and found. But because he lacked the appropriate tools, he was unable to build a bridge across the great gap. Also the other patriarchs thought about it, but in greater or lesser indifference, patiently biding their time and silently shifting the blame here and there. This, however, did not bring light and warmth into the erring hearts.
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"The mother Eve did show a considerable light to the father Seth; but a bright shine in the night blinds the weak eye even more than the night did before. And thus everyone's effort was punished by the subsequent threefold darkness.
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"However, there is no wiser teacher than necessity. In our great need we all turned to the holy, most loving Father and He saw the need of the children and descended to them with His grace. We're the children, but He is among us and teaches us Himself!
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"And His words are a loud call full of love and wisdom; for this is what the holy, most loving Father says:
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'Listen, children of My love, and comprehend it well in your hearts. I am the one eternal God, Creator of all things out of Me and Father of My Love and all those out of it.
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"I am forever free and boundless, and My love is the bliss of My eternal freedom itself.
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"All the beings are no necessity, but are for the created beings only visible marks of My supreme, completely free might and going forth from it the Bliss of all bliss. What should or could force Me to act in one-way or another?
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"What you call 'law' is for Me the supreme freedom in the bliss of My love; but what you call 'freedom' is nothing but My free might. Therefore, live for love, live for the eternal Love within Me, and then your life is truly free! And only the freedom of life will fully teach you that the law of love is the actual, supreme freedom and that law and freedom are like a circle, which everywhere meets itself and frees itself through the order, according to which it forever forms itself in endless perfection.
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'Therefore love, then the law is subject to you and you are completely free as I, your Father, am! Amen"