Love is the Fulfilling of the Law

ON LOVE; PART CCLXXXII

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GoodWill IS Love in Action

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Of all that the Master told us, He considered this as the Greatest of Commandments. So much of what we are to understand as aspirants or as believers is found in the precept that we must KEEP HIS WORDS:

“And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these” (Mark 12:30-31).

We ask ourselves WHAT THEN IS LOVE?

In a general sense love is benevolence, good will; that disposition of heart which inclines men to think favorably of their fellow men, and to do them good. In a theological sense, it includes supreme love to God, and universal good will to men.

We add to this THE EVER IMPORTANT AND HIGH IDEAL TAUGHT TO US BY THE CHRIST which can serve to both give us an understanding of what it means to Love oneself and how it is that we can Love our neighbor:

“Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them“ (Matthew 7:12).

In the last post regarding our current topic of Love, we began an exploration of the ideas included in the word meek, a word that is currently misunderstood, at least from a biblical perspective. We were brought to this word by our own statement that: For many the ideas of scripture on how to deal with others seems to be a form of weakness. In this saying our intent was to show that most ALL of the good that the Master teaches us in regard to how we treat our neighbor, our brother and the stranger who qualifies as both, is seen by many as being weak as we let others perhaps take advantage and whether this is led by the current defining terms for the word meek or if the current defining terms are the result of this attitude of not showing weakness toward others, is unknown. The reality is however that the word meek has obtained a definition which was NOT the intended one based on its use in the New Testament and has taken on the context of weakness and pusillanimity as Vine’s notes or the overly submissive or compliant; spiritless; tame definition from our modern dictionary ⁷. We showed that the 19th Century understanding of meek was much more aligned with the Master’s thoughts as we can see in this from Webster’s 1828 dictionary: 1. Mild of temper; soft; gentle; not easily provoked or irritated; yielding; given to forbearance under injuries. Now the man Moses was very meek, above all men. Num.12. 2. Appropriately humble, in an evangelical sense; submissive to the divine will; not proud, self-sufficient or refractory; not peevish and apt to complain of divine dispensations. Christ says, “Learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest to your souls.” Matt.11. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Matt.5 ¹.

Now this evolution of meanings over the last nearly 200 years, and where this starts is unclear, has given us today a negative understanding of this word and has caused the more recent bible translations to change the rendering from the original meek as it is used in the King James Version of 1611 (KJV), the Revised Version of 1881 (RV) and the American Standard Version of 1901 (ASV), to gentle, which word in our understanding DOES NOT rightly serve the sayings where it is used. From our look at the several sources of information on this word in the last essay, we found some ideas that agree with our view of what the Master and His apostles are trying to convey through this Greek word praus or praos and, as we noted, the lexicon gives us different understandings of these by greatly expanding their explanation of the former. As we read in the last post the doctrinal view of these words places the idea in regard to God; the lexicon tells us that: Thus,meekness toward evil people means knowing God is permitting the injuries they inflict, that He is using them to purify His elect, and that He will deliver His elect in His time ². Vines, in a similar view tells us: Rather it is an inwrought grace of the soul; and the exercises of it are first and chiefly towards God. It is that temper of spirit in which we accept His dealings with us as good, and therefore without disputing or resisting;……the adjectives….”meek and lowly;” … it is only the humble heart which is also the meek, and which, as such, does not fight against God and more or less struggle and contend with Him. This meekness, however, being first of all a meekness before God, is also such in the face of men, even of evil men, out of a sense that these, with the insults and injuries which they may inflict, are permitted and employed by Him for the chastening and purifying of His elect ⁶. These doctrinal presentations show meek as acceptance of what may happen based upon the understanding that it is ‘God’s Will’ and this IS from our perspective nonsensical as the whole of this theory of the actions of God in the world and toward His ‘elect’ bypasses the reality of the limited free-will that man has in this world. It IS because of the free-will that there IS NO intercession in the affairs of man and this precludes any chastening and purifying of His elect, and, this is covered as well under that statement by the apostles that “God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34) and our own understanding that the link to God by every man IS through his own Soul.

As we said, we do get some help in understanding this word as well from Vine’s who tells us that: Described negatively, meekness is the opposite to self-assertiveness and self-interest; it is equanimity of spirit that is neither elated nor cast down, simply because it is not occupied with self at all; Vine’s also tells us that meek as used: In Gal. 5:23 it is associated with enkrateia, “self-control.”⁶  In the combination of these ideas we see the self control that we will speak about in our own terms as well as the reality that the self, one’s presence in the world and his interests, are not the subject of meek as we must try to understand it. Vincent also gives us an interesting understanding of meek from within his doctrinal oriented statement; he says in part that: The Christian word….describes an inward quality, and that as related primarily to God. The equanimity, mildness, kindness, represented by the classical word, are founded in self-control or in natural disposition ⁴. In both of these defining explanations of the Greek word that IS rendered as meek we find reference to self-control and we should understand that THIS self-control comes from the Soul as the whole of the idea of meekness is tied to Love and the Soul IS the source of this Love. Again we must repeat that this IS the Love that the Master teaches us and NOT that emotional attraction in the world. We have used two different thoughts to characterize this meekness; positive harmlessness and humble restraint and both of these do capture our understanding of meek.

Both of these ideas are the attitude of the Master and the character of His teachings; it IS in this spirit of meekness that He tells us that we should “Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you” (Luke 6:27). Can we see here the idea of harmlessness and restraint as compared to the worldly attitude that one would have toward an enemy or toward one who hates us. For one who would curse you or use you or strike you this idea IS the same and in Jesus teaching we should be able to see the positive nature of this harmlessness as this IS a conscious endeavor to treat these who ARE as such to you in that same Love that we would treat those who we see as Loving us. Can we see the self-control that we read about from Vine’s and Vincent, again, a conscious endeavor to NOT act the man in the world but the Soul whose nature IS Love. This attitude of positive harmlessness and self-control IS meekness. Similarly we have the idea of humble restraint which is also a conscious endeavor and should give us the understanding that when pressed as a man in the world to a point of retaliation of any kind, the meek man steps back and goes his way without much ado; here we have the understanding that although one can take action, he DOES NOT and a note in this area from the gospels may help us to understand how this IS seen by the Master:

“And it came to pass, when the time was come that he should be received up, he stedfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem, And sent messengers before his face: and they went, and entered into a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him. And they did not receive him, because his face was as though he would go to Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did? But he turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them. And they went to another village” (Luke 9:51-56).

Now these are difficult verses to put into perspective; we KNOW that the Master senses the time IS come to go to Jerusalem and that He begins this journey but the rest is bewildering. First that he has an advance party as we read this nowhere else; the second is the attitude of the Samaritans who seem to be against Him but for a reason that we do not understand and third is the attitude of the disciples who are looking to ‘retaliate’ against the Samaritans because of their attitude and to do so with much vengeance showing their lack of understanding at this time. The Master however is meek and exhibits this positive harmlessness and humble restraint that we speak about above and this is the lesson to His disciples; to tell them that their attitude is wrong and to tell them why in reminding them of the reason for His presence as well as the mission of the disciple, saying to them: ”the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them” and in this and most ALL references we should try to see ourselves also as the Son of man. And to our point, they move on to another village, KNOWING that He could have acted in  a worldly fashion in anger, He just moves on. This IS the meaning of meek from the Master’s perspective and His teaching to His disciples.

We close today with this from a previous essay which encapsulates our understanding of meek from the perspective of the aspirant, being meek and practicing those qualities of positive harmlessness and humble restraint.

Harmlessness is not to be seen as a form of weakness or of inability but it should be seen as a form of strength that gives the one who expresses it a Quality that we find in the Master and this is the Quality of being MEEK. The word meek appears three times in our King James Version and is rendered as gentle in other versions. These are our gospel references for this:

• “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5).
• “Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls” (Matthew 11:29).
• “Tell ye the daughter of Sion, Behold , thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass” (Matthew 21:5).

The first two here are from the Master’s lips and the last is the reminding by Matthew of the saying of the prophet. We should be able to see in this the idea of gentle but this is not all that it means. Like harmlessness, we need to take this word to a positive place based on the idea that gentleness alone will not give one the inheritance cited above and gentleness alone is not how the Master would describe himself at the same time as He is going about challenging the rulers of the land. Early on in our posts we offered a definition of meek while discussing the Beatitudes; we said then that: Meek is for our purpose here defined as Positive Harmlessness. A quality by which we know that we are capable of doing and saying and believing whatever we want to but as we strive toward the Kingdom we think and know better than to follow the ways of the world; we attend to the ways of the Spirit. We can say things that offend but we do not. We can put things in motion that hurt others but we do not. We can believe we are better or more able that the next person but we do not. We live our lives in accordance with the Word and we resist passions and desires; we resist anger and hate and we resist lusts and greed. This is being meek. Let us go forward here using this same idea as both meek and harmless as we try to expand upon our ideas.
Our definition above precludes weakness and inability and it precludes also fear as we are saying that we are fully able to do a certain thing or to think in a certain way but we do not because we KNOW to do better and this KNOWING we get from the Soul, the Christ Within and this is what the Master tells us is ”righteous judgment“. We have at times given here in our posts quotations from the Tibetan who we describe as a Disciple of the Christ who has made it to that spiritual place wherein he has become a teacher and who is called by some a master. These are some of the Tibetan’s words on harmlessness which we can also ascribe to the word meek in the sense that we need to understand it; he says:
‘What shall I say concerning harmlessness? It is not easy for me to show or prove to you the effectiveness of the higher aspect, spiral or phase of harmlessness as employed by the Hierarchy, under the direction of the Perfect One, the Christ. The harmlessness with which I have earlier dealt has relation to the imperfections with which humanity is wrestling, and is difficult for you to apply in and under all circumstances, as well you know. The harmlessness to which I refer in connection with you is not negative, or sweet or kindly activity, as so many believe; it is a state of mind and one which in no way negates firm or even drastic action; it concerns motive and involves the determination that the motive behind all activity is goodwill. That motive might lead to positive and sometimes disagreeable action or speech, but as harmlessness and goodwill condition the mental approach, nothing can eventuate but good“. **

In another place we say this which we repeated in the last post as well: In addition to these teachings on Love the Master teaches us meekness and does so in many ways that are apparent when we realize the True meaning of this concept which we have defined as humble restraint which should give us the understanding that one who can have his way and do as he will is in meekness when he has the ability but he does not use it.

We will continue with our thoughts in the next post.

Aspect of God	Potency	Aspect of Man	In Relation to the Great Invocation	In relation to the Christ
GOD, The Father	Will or Power	Spirit or Life	Center where the Will of God IS KNOWN	Life
Son, The Christ	Love and Wisdom	Soul or Christ Within	Heart of God	Truth
Holy Spirit	Light or Activity	Life Within	Mind of God	Way

Note on the Quote of the Day

This daily blog also has a Quote of the Day which may not be in any way related to the essay. Many of these will be from the Bible and some just prayers or meditations that may have an influence on you and are in line with the subject matter of this blog. As the quote will change daily and will not store with the post, it is repeated in this section with the book reference and comment.

We should ever understand that the purpose of our aspiration and of our discipleship is to bring into the world our expression of the Love and the Power of the Soul both as an example of the righteous Life and as a ready aid to our brothers, our neighbors and the stranger who qualifies as both. Our intent should be to serve and in our service to instill in others that same sense that we have; from a spiritual perspective to the spiritual man, and from a worldly perspective to the man who is yet grounded in the world. The Apostle Paul puts it this way for us from his own Life and personal experience:

“for if I may proclaim good news, it is no glorying for me, for necessity is laid upon me, and wo is to me if I may not proclaim good news; for if willing I do this, I have a reward; and if unwillingly — with a stewardship I have been entrusted! What, then, is my reward? — that proclaiming good news, without charge I shall make the good news of the Christ, not to abuse my authority in the good news; for being free from all men, to all men I made myself servant, that the more I might gain; and I became to the Jews as a Jew, that Jews I might gain; to those under law as under law, that those under law I might gain; to those without law, as without law — (not being without law to God, but within law to Christ) — that I might gain those without law; I became to the infirm as infirm, that the infirm I might gain; to all men I have become all things, that by all means I may save some. And this I do because of the good news, that a fellow-partaker of it I may become;  have ye not known that those running in a race — all indeed run, but one doth receive the prize? so run ye, that ye may obtain” (1 Corinthians 9:16-24).

With this in mind we redo a past Quote of the Day and one that we have been using from very early on in this blog. The sentiment here is the fulfillment of our duty as aspirants and disciples and our duty it to instill these ideas in the hearts and minds of others.

Values to Live By

A Love of Truth—essential
for a just, inclusive and progressive society;

A Sense of Justice—recognition
of the rights and needs, of all.

Spirit of Cooperation—based
on active goodwill and the principle of right human
relationships;

A Sense of Personal Responsibility—for
group, community and national affairs;

Serving the Common Good— through
the sacrifice of selfishness. Only what is good for all
is good for each one.

The world of the future depends on what each one of us chooses to do today.

Let the peace of God rule in your hearts!

• ¹ Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1828 and 1913
• ² New Testament Greek Lexicon on BibleStudyTools.com
• ⁴ Word Studies in the New Testament; Marvin R Vincent D.D. 2nd edition, 1888
• ⁶ Vine’s Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words, 1996
• ⁷ Dictionary.com Unabridged based on Random House Dictionary – 2011