IN THE WORDS OF JESUS–Part 284

Love is the Fulfilling of the Law

ON GOD; Part LXX

In yesterday’s post we left off with a saying by the Apostle John which we have said offers some difficulty to us who desire to understand the motives and the full message of the Master. The saying was offered as a Good Friday oriented end to our discourse and is one which leads up to His capture, His suffering and His death. There are not many places where the Master decries His impending, predicted and rather scripted death on the cross and in this saying we find Him lifting up this idea so that we might follow. Remembering that so much of His teaching is in parable, can we not see this as such too?  Can we see that in Jesus mind that His giving up His physical, worldly, Life is for us a guide that we are to do the same, that we are to bear our cross. As the Apostle Paul puts it, “And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts” (Galatians 5:24). For us who follow Him there is no need to die on the cross physically as He did in showing us the way as we can likely see the steps taken of we look from the proper perspective.

• First we must be captured and overwhelmed by the Spirit and the Soul. We look at Life and we do not want to give it up as it is what we have come to know. Here we find Jesus at Gethsemane reasoning with the Father and His own the God Within to let Him be spared the agony of this undertaking while KNOWING that there is no other way and here we find the aspirant reasoning with the Christ Withing, with his own Soul, if there might be a better way than giving up all that we have and we know while at the same time KNOWING that this is the ONLY way. Let us look past the Last Supper and the betrayal by Judas as these are just events that lead us to the capture of our Master in this scripted way and to our capture of our own consciousness by the Light of the Soul. Can we see His words regarding this from our discussion yesterday? “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).
• Next the Master is taken to the High Priest and to Pilate, representatives of Life in the World but from different perspectives. The High Priest demands the death of the Master as His Life upsets the status quo and brings forth continued  teaching and miracles which over the more time will outperform the old ritualistic ways in the minds of the people. The Master succumbs to the will of the High Priest because He knows that it is the only way and this is our lesson; the flesh must die or rather the will of the personality must cease to hold sway in one’s Life. We must do as the Master did and give up our claims to this Life here on Earth. Pilate offers some method of reprieve but the Master does not act and He does not ask for mercy or for anything from the powers that are in the world; He offers no resistance. He teaches us here “that men ought always to pray, and not to faint” (Luke 18:1) which He says to His disciples and others at the end of His speaking to them  again about His own fate and after saying again that “Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it” (Luke 17:33). This is to be our perspective, that we “faint not” in the face of the rigors of losing the carnal and worldly Life of man, that we should offer no resistance to the will of and the Light of the Soul, the True Life.
• Next is the crucifixion, the end of Life in the world of men and being among them as they are. The steady march from capture, to judgement and then to the cross is, for the Master, a seamless journey out of the world and in this is our lesson as well. The Master grows weary in this march and so will we; the Master is given some help in His time of greatest tribulation, help in the carrying of the cross to His own death and it is likely that when we as men can reach this High Point in our Spiritual Lives that we will find some help as well. When the Soul, the Christ Within, comes to this point we will no longer be seeing, as Paul tells us, “darkly” but we will be seeing “face to face” and will be able to say of our own steady march that  “now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Corinthians 13:12); in the Fullness of the Glory of God. There is a point of no return; for the Master it was upon the pronouncement of Pilate and for us is is the same; there comes a time when there finally dawns upon the man that there is nothing left for him that is of the world and when, as the Conscious Self, he deflects the powers of the world of men to keep him as the Christ deflected the power of Pilate to keep Him.

The Master suffered the physical death on the cross and the world has built much dogma from it and has missed the point that He was making. Perhaps again this was intentional, perhaps the world was not ready for His reality in words but only in His showing them the meaninglessness of the Life that each holds so dear. So we speak of the Blood of Christ as the atonement for the sins of the world and in some ways this is a Truth but not in the many varied ways that the church has positioned it. Based upon the words of the Apostles, the writers of the gospels and the epistles, which were intended to speak to those people in the way that they could understand and to change them from the way they were to the way that the New Age meant for them to be, man has built the doctrines that we know today. In more than 2000 years little has been done to reconcile these doctrines with the reality of the teachings of the Master; in fact, the more modern church has made the doctrines more difficult to attach to a reality and to overcome with Truth. 

The world of Christianity is mired in the age old ideas of atonement; be it called vicarious or substitutionary, the idea is that Jesus died for the sins of the world and that in His death He took on all of the sins of mankind and many believe that this is an continuing saga. Much of this is based on the words of the Apostles and much is taken out of context and misunderstood. Sayings such as  “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21) take on monumental proportion in the doctrine of atonement  and are taken to the heart of Christian teaching in place of sayings like: “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:5-8). Simple words like “of no reputation“, “the form of a servant“, “humbled himself” and “obedient unto death” are swallowed up in the doctrine of atonement which, in the True teachings of the Master would better be understood as AT-ONE-MENT.

Returning now to our saying from the Gospel of John that we ended with in the last post:

“This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you” (John 15:12-14).

In so many places where we read commentaries on the words “love one another” they are referred to Love for the brethren or for fellow Christians and we have always maintained that, based on the overall teachings of the Master, this is not so but rather the Master never leaves off on His commandment that we Love ALL. As doctrine, where it exists in this form of Love only for brethren and Christians, we find the height of the illusion created by man and one that frees him to look at Life in this myopic way. John Gill, one of our most quoted commentators, frequently ascribes this “love one another” to brethren and Christians  and we state some of his comments here so as to see the Truth that does come through and the bent of doctrine:

• In regard to another saying by the Master, “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another” (John 13:34), Mr. Gill says this: A new commandment I give unto you As parents, when they take their leave of their children, in their dying moments, give them proper instructions and orders, and lay their dying injunctions on them, so Christ taking his leave of his disciples, gives them his; which were, that they love one another: as brethren in the same family, children of the same Father, and fellow disciples with each other; by keeping and agreeing together, praying one for another, bearing one another’s burdens, forbearing and forgiving one another, admonishing each other, and building up one another in faith and holiness: and this he calls “a new commandment”; that is, a very excellent one; as a “new name”, and a “new song”, denote excellent ones; or it is so called, because it is set forth by Christ, in a new edition of it, and newly and more clearly explained, than before; and being enforced with a new argument and pattern, never used before⁸. Can we see the idea here of who Gill thinks to Love?
• Against this saying in Romans “Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law” (Romans 13:8), Mr. Gill says But to love one another. This is the only debt never to be wholly discharged; for though it should be always paying, yet ought always to be looked upon as owing. Saints ought to love one another as such; to this they are obliged by the new commandment of Christ, by the love of God, and Christ unto them, by the relations they stand in to one another, as the children of God, brethren, and members of the same body; and which is necessary to keep them and the churches of Christ together, it being the bond of perfectness by which they are knit to one another; and for their comfort and honour, as well as to show the truth and reality of their profession. This debt should be always paying; saints should be continually serving one another in love, praying for each other, bearing one another’s burdens, forbearing each other, and doing all good offices in things temporal and spiritual that lie in their power, and yet always owing; the obligation to it always remains. Christ’s commandment is a new one, always new, and will never be antiquated; his and his Father’s love always continue, and the relations believers stand in to each other are ever the same; and therefore love will be always paying, and always owing in heaven to all eternity⁸. Do we see here the source of much of today’s doctrine which seems to bypass the remainder of Gill’s remarks which say: But what the apostle seems chiefly to respect, is love to one another as men, love to one another, to the neighbour, as the following verses show. Love is a debt we owe to every man, as a man, being all made of one blood, and in the image of God; so that not only such as are of the same family, live in the same neighbourhood, and belong to the same nation, but even all the individuals of mankind, yea, our very enemies are to share in our love; and as we have an opportunity and ability, are to show it by doing them good⁸. Now this is not so clean as we would like it to be but in this are the seeds of the reality of the Master’s teachings. How sorely this last attitude is missing in the world today.
• In relation to this from the Apostle Peter “Seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren, see that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently” (1 Peter 1:22) Mr. Gill tells us that [see that ye] love one another with a pure heart fervently: this is Christ’s new commandment, and the evidence of regeneration; a distinguishing badge of Christianity, and without which all profession of religion is a vain and empty thing: this should he mutual and cordial; should proceed from the heart, and from an heart sprinkled from an evil conscience; and should be with warmth and fervency, and not with coldness and indifference; though the word here used, (ektenwv) , may not only design the intenseness of it, but the extensiveness of it also; as that it should reach to all the saints, the poor as well as the rich, and the lesser as well as the greater and more knowing believers; and likewise may denote the continuance of it; it ought to be continually exercised, and to last always; and so the Arabic version renders it, “with a perpetual love”⁸. Here again we revert to the idea of brethren and Christians in place of ALL and while the words of Peter include the Real Love for the brethren, do we presume that he meant to leave others out or is this just a difficulty of language?
• Finally we have our saying above from John’s Gospel. Here Mr. Gill give us some very profound observations on what we see as the reality of this Love for ALL. He says: This is my commandment, that ye love one another Christ had been before speaking of his commandments; and he mentions this as the principal one, and to which all the rest may be reduced; for as the precepts of the second table of the moral law may be briefly comprehended in this one duty, love to our neighbour, so all the duties of Christianity, relative to one another, are reducible to this, by love to serve each other. This was the commandment which lay uppermost on Christ’s heart, and which he knew, if attended to, the rest could not fail of being observed. The argument by which, and the manner in which, he presses it, is as before: as I have loved you; than which nothing can be more strong and forcible; see (John 13:34)⁸. Can we appreciate here the beauty and the force of Mr. Gills words and can we see a glimpse of his own understanding?

We have in this saying, according to our reading and Mr. Gill, the reality of Love for All of Gods Creation. The Master is giving a parting commandment, He is repeating what He had told them once before according to the scriptures and He is saying it with the added force of showing the disciples the DEPTH of this Love. He tells them that there is no Greater Love than to lay down one’s Life for a friend and continues on to tell them that they are His friends. In this is the culmination of His message to them; that He is going to die and they should see this as being done for them. He adds for us that we should understand His friends as we understand His disciples and this in His saying that “Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you” which we should see in the same Light as “If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed“. This is a connection that must be made, that the Master is laying down His Life for to show us a way that we can follow Him; in this is the True depth of His teaching and we should see in this that whenever a man becomes a disciple and forsakes all, that he is giving a way for others to follow on this most difficult road to the strait gate and the narrow way.

Tomorrow is Easter Sunday, the Day of the Resurrection of the Master and the continuation of His teachings to us who are His disciples and aspirants to discipleship.

Note on the Quote of the Day