IN THE WORDS OF JESUS–Part 396

Love is the Fulfilling of the Law

ON GOD; Part CLXXVII

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GoodWill IS Love in Action

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“There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God. But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you. Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh. For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live” (Romans 8:1-13).

We spent our time in yesterday’s post completing our discussion of service as it comes to us from the Master’s words and ended this with an exchange between Peter and the Master in which we see a very different dynamic than do the commentators and interpreters of scripture that we frequently use. We see this as a further command to service and we see most all of the Master’s words to Peter as instruction in discipleship which includes at times chastisement from the Master which can be seen as the same from our own Christ Within. The bottom line here is that we were able to tie together the ideas of Love and service which are ever together in the Master’s words and we were able to show the reality of continued or never ending service on the part of the disciple of the Lord who ever seeks additional opportunity to serve.

We then began our discussion on these first thirteen verses from the eighth chapter the Apostle Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and we began this with the last verse of the previous chapter which paints for us the struggle of duality in the Life of the aspirant and the disciple. This duality takes hold of the man in form at such a time as he becomes aware of the Soul, the Christ Within, and begins to pay attention to the promptings to the Good, the Beautiful and the True which ever stream forth; it is here that a man then senses the duality and the attendant illusion and glamour that have covered his Life heretofore, creating for the personality, the body with the emotional and mental apparatus, that sense of oneness with and in the world. A man may attend church and even participate in religious things but it is not until that point in time where he can hear his own Soul and respond that this duality becomes for him a factor in his Life. In this last line from the previous chapter the apostle is making final note of this sensed duality that he speaks of throughout the chapter; Paul says: “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin” (Romans 7:25). In our last post we tried to correct our understanding of the mind in this context of nous so that it be the consciousness of the man as it is a part of the Life of the Soul and not the form; it is only in this way can we see this word also referring to God and to Christ and to that higher part of the man that serves God. We should understand here that Paul’s apparent aversion to the law as the commandments is that in following these the man is attempting to force upon the flesh the moral and ethical provisions of God’s law without the heart being in it and we KNOW this heart is spoken of by the Master in the same vein as mind is spoken of here by Paul. This was the nature of things in the pre-Christ times as the man had not the wherewithal to participate fully except he have the revelation of the Christ Within; the same is likely true today for many but at the same time because of the Advent of Christ the race is better prepared to understand with the heart. The reference to the Christ Within in the times before Christ is a right analysis although the name Christ may never have been heard; the Soul of man has ever been trying to take control of the Life in form and since Christ the man in form is better able to do so as the personality’s sense of the world has changed. We must try to always remember that it is the Soul, the Christ Within, that is the True man and not this body and its affiliated personality; it is to these that the Soul gives Life and consciousness for a time and it is in that time that the Soul must make progress toward the expression of the fullness of the Christ Within through that form.

This then is the idea of these words of Paul that show us the duality of Soul or Christ Within and the ways of the Life of the personality as it is attracted to the vain and selfish by reason of the illusion and the glamour that tell a man in his conscious focus that he is of the world. It is in this context that the idea of focus is an important consideration for our understanding; much like in our discussion of the treasure of the heart we have here the same, the focus of the consciousness. We can ALL likely understand the fleeting thoughts that come in and out of our field of attention based upon what we see and we hear and the wandering of the mind and, at the same time we, as aspirants, should be able to understand the input of the Soul, corrective at times, as he tries to maintain control over the process. Can we see this in Paul’s words? In his understanding of this duality of Life in form he paints for us the picture of what is happening to us ALL.

In the first verse above Paul uses the word condemnation and it is for us uncertain as to what he means in this. This is a word however that is only used by Paul and only in this Epistle to the Romans. In doctrine we can see that it means to be condemned but how are we to understand this? Doctrine tells us that this is the condemnation to death based upon the transgressions of Adam. John Gill in his Exposition of the Bible⁸ tells us on this condemnation from another place where it is combined with the word judgement that: by “judgment” is meant, not the judgment of God, or the judiciary sentence pronounced by God on Adam and his posterity for sin; but the guilt of the one man’s sin, which is imputed to all men to condemnation, on account of which the sentence of condemnation passed on all men; the law transgressed, became a ministration of condemnation to them⁸. Gill adds in a subsequent verse: which word is used in a legal sense, and intends condemnation to eternal death, as appears from the antithesis in the text; for if “justification of life”, means an adjudging to eternal life, as it certainly does, the judgment or guilt, which is unto condemnation, must design a condemnation to eternal death, the just wages of sin: and this sentence of condemnation comes upon all men, all the sons of Adam without exception, even upon the elect of God themselves; though it is not executed upon them, but on their surety, whereby they are delivered from it⁸. In doctrine then this idea of condemnation is carried forward to our current verse, the last use of the word by Paul, where he is saying that this has no effect upon “them which are in Christ Jesus“. Now we have always discounted the church doctrines in this matter of Adam’s transgression and its effect on us and we reject this here as well. There is perhaps some relevance in Paul’s words so as to give the Jew the idea of the continuation of the same understanding that they previously had but this is even for us a stretch as for us the realities of Life supersede this reliance on doctrines that only serve to confuse and delay one’s True understanding.

In the slow building of his theme, Paul employs words that ring familiar with the people of his time and at the same time he brings them and us to the brink of revelation if we can but see it. This is how we will look at the apostle’s words seeing that we have as our premise that this first part is more readily discernible when we have understood the second part properly. Let us try to equivocate the idea here of condemnation with the idea of man’s being “made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope” (Romans 8:21). This first verse comes directly after that verse we cite above regarding the mind and the flesh and so we should be able to see that for those whose mind is on the Christ and the Christ Within that there is no condemnation, that is to say that there is no longer that sense of being lost in the world of vanity, the world of illusion and of glamour. In this we should be able to also understand the relevance of the various interpretations that this condemnation is death albeit from a different perspective than that of doctrine. They see this death as a separation from God because of the transgressions of Adam we see it as separation because of man’s being “made subject to vanity“, his being incarnated into the world of men. When we can see this great mystery from the perspective of the Soul and can grasp the Unity of Life as not including this form and personality but only the Spirit, manifest as the Soul and as the Life and consciousness that is the Soul in form, we can then begin to understand our relationship to ALL men and the foundation of that Love that the Christ teaches and which God IS. The wranglings of the man in form, his vanity and his struggles with illusion and glamour are due solely to the fact of his incarnation into this world and while we may tend to think that it is the Souls objective to get out of this Life in form, this is not the case. The Soul continues in this struggle incarnation after incarnation as a part of that Great Plan of God with the objective of developing the ability to express the fullness of the Life that IS the Soul through his form. Again, in this then is the “expectation of the creature“, that consciousness of the Soul lost in form (or the entirety of the creation as regards man), as he waits “for the manifestation of the sons of God” and this “Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption” which is Life in this world and “into the glorious liberty of the children of God“. In this state Paul tells us we are “waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body” (Romans 8: 19, 21, 23) which is found in the reality of this word adoption for which Vincent gives us a defining understanding saying that the adopted son of God becomes, in a peculiar and intimate sense, one with the heavenly Father and this is the objective of our subjection to Life here in this Earth.

Can we see here the ultimate finality of the so called condemnation of the Soul in form? Can we see the orderly Plan of God as the evolution of the form life on the Earth and the evolution of the consciousness that is able to dwell therein and can we see the redemption of the body, of ALL the bodies, as the force of the Love of God permeates the Earth leading to the transfiguration of the both by means of the free-flowing fullness of the Awesome Power of God?

As we go on with our discussion of these sayings by Paul we come to the reason for one’s being free from the condemnation and this is found in “For the law of the Spirit of life” which we see as the realities of the Life of the Soul, “hath made me free from the law of sin and death” which we can see as the realities of being “made subject to vanity“. We skipped over the words “in Christ Jesus” in order to tear this idea away from doctrines which see mostly this phrase to the exclusion of the rest; this same idea is in the first verse where we see that there is “no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus“. Now we can equate this to believing in Christ as we have come to understand it and this would be a Truth for we understand that to believe in or to believe on is to accept and adopt His precepts and example as binding upon the life⁴  and this we KNOW also as to follow Him and to keep His words. We can also equate this with the focus of the consciousness of the man on the Christ Within; a man with such a focus is free from the condemnation in this same way. These are some of the realities of being in Christ and of what Paul calls the mystery of “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27).

This next point is one that we touch upon earlier. Paul frames this here as “what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh” and in this we should be able to understand the dynamics involved in this based upon the inability of the Jewish nation to adhere to the law as commanded as was man’s attempt in that era from Moses to the Master. The law is given and there are undoubtedly some that conform to the law but for the majority this is not the case and although they do evolve and progress during this time, the masses of men move slowly along. This is the reality of the apostles telling them and us that the the law was “weak through the flesh” as the average man had not the wherewithal to overcome the vanity; that is the illusion and the glamour. There is a parallel between this idea from 2000 years ago and today with the difference being the teachings of the Master. The Master teaches us Love and the ONENESS of man and GOD in this new dispensation which He ushered in; there is no more reliance on just the words of the Law having the right effect based solely on the idea that they are from God. The new dispensation seeks to write the Law in the hearts of men as the scriptures say which is to mean that a man will have a conscious understanding of them and will do them because the Inner Man, the heart, so directs him. We can posit that in the earlier times it was not the ready ability of the Soul to express himself through the form in the way that we can accomplish this now; today the man is much more the thinker and the realization of what is happening guides the man who sees. In the time from Moses to Christ the race was far less mentally oriented and much more emotionally driven and we should see these things as s-l-o-w-l-y moving changes; from the inception of an era we can see that there is the ever so slow change in the nature of the creature and the Souls ability to use it.

This is evolution of both the form and the Soul. The changes are slow as we can see in review of the time of Moses to the time of Christ to pick some points in time. Moses brought the law to the Jewish race and it took many many years for the laws acceptance by the people and then yet more for its adaptation to their way of Life. Note we did not say the adaptation of the way of Life to the law. Christ brought us a new and a different approach and here, 2000 years later, the majority of the race does not see or understand it but they do react to it and this is in the so called Christian world and the non-Christian as well. The effects of the dispensation of Love are today seen in the lives most all men as the forms that men use have evolved to a more mental state and the Souls that use them have evolved in their capacity to do so. This is the result of the steady progression of Life for the last 2000 years and this progression continues but not without the same fits and starts that have always been the way of change.

In this is the reality of evolution as we can understand it. We will continue with our thoughts in the next post.