The Great Gospel of John
Volume 2
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
First journey of the Lord: Kis - landing place at Sibarah - Nazareth
- Chapter 29 -
Blessedness of free development.
1
(The Lord:) "Therefore, it is good and right to punish sinners if they have strayed too much from the order which God Himself has set for certain perfection attainable in the shortest possible time. But no one should be prevented from the possibility of sinning through an inflexible "must". For I assure you: I prefer a sinner who voluntarily repents to 99 righteous according to the law who never needed repentance. The first one is a complete man, the others only partly.
2
Thereby I do not, of course, want to say that I prefer a sinner, who is always a sinner, to a righteous man, for to continue in sin means: to also become an animal which lives an unclean life prompted by a false instinctive motivation. Here I speak only of a sinner who in himself freely recognises that it was wrong to act contrary to the law and who begins to change his attitude according to the recognised order of God and becomes a man who is familiar with every lesson life teaches.
3
Once in My Kingdom such a spirit will be capable of achieving endlessly greater things than one who out of slavish fear never strayed from the law by a hair's breadth and in this be fear dictated observance of the law has physically and spiritually turned himself into a machine without a free will.
4
Take a stone and throw it upwards! In accordance with the "must" law put into it, it shall not take long for it to fall back to earth. Is the stone to be praised for keeping the law so strictly? You can certainly do all sorts of things with the stone as far as a solid foundation is concerned; but create some free activity for it, and it shall not abandon its dead rest!
5
Hence you should not turn people into stones through "must" laws but rather educate them in their freedom, then you have acted fully in accordance with God's order.
6
Behold, if the people highly placed upon earth were not as lazy as they are, with rare exception they would with just a random amount of investigative spirit have quite easily noted that any person with a certain degree of education shall not in all eternity be satisfied with an animalistic monotony. He no longer builds a hut with thatches, straw and kneaded clay, but masons stones and bakes clay into bricks, building himself a stately dwelling with encircling walls, adding solid towers from whose battlements he can espy the approach of potential enemies!
7
And so a thousand educated people shall build themselves dwellings from which none resembles another - neither in shape nor interior design; but in contrast look at the nest of birds and animal retreats, and you shall never find diversification! Look at a swallow's or sparrow's nest or a spider's web or bee's cell and a thousand other products or efforts brought forth by animals, and you shall find neither an improvement nor retrogression. But compare human works: what almost limitless diversity! And yet it is always only humans which bring all this about with often much effort!
8
This proves clearly that God Who endowed man with a spirit similar to His own, did not create man to become an animal, but to gain the fullest and freest God-likeness."