THE GREAT GOSPEL OF JOHN
VOLUME 5
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
Jesus in the region of Caesarea Philippi. (cont.) Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 16
- Chapter 46 -
Priesthood as an enemy of the light.
1
(Raphael) "I tell you that there will come a time when the people will drive on iron roads as fast as a flying arrow and will speak from one end of the world to another in lightning speed, and will fly around in the air like birds, far over the seas and lands "and yet no-one will consider them to be magicians, and even less gods! Truly the ever-existent priesthood will constantly make every effort to prevent such a revelation coming to the people; but their efforts will also always be totally in vain!
2
The more they attempt to lead the people in night and all darkness, the more they will wake the ever-existent spirits of light to their greater opposition, and there will always be a greater and more intensive light spread out among the people, until in the end the priesthood themselves will be forced to swallow the bitter pill of light and become apostles of the light; but much fighting will be needed for this.
3
It will come to pass that the magicians will be highly persecuted, and the seed of this persecution already exists in part among the Pharisees, who are not disposed towards the magicians, but also for the most part among you Essenes, who are now buying up the magical skills from all over the world. You now look at each miracle-worker with secretly very envious eyes, particularly when he performs some miracle that you have already collected and locked away inside your walls to deceive the people.
4
But it now pleases the Lord God to gradually allow not the priests, but quite inconspicuous people to make very extraordinary inventions, through which the people are placed at an extraordinary level of culture.
5
On the other hand the priesthood is certainly becoming stentorian and beginning to even agitate with fire and sword, but all that will be of no good to them; for the harder they begin to fight, the more nakedly they will lay they their selfish and domineering evil desires before the eyes of the people and lose their every faith and trust.
6
For no-one will place any further trust in a person when one has noticed once already that he wanted to deceive somebody, yes, not even if he comes forward with a very real and true matter; for one fears then some hidden bad intention hidden in the background and keeping evil watch in the background and. Therefore there will be not only the partial, but also the entire end to a priesthood which has exposed itself too much through its dire eagerness.
7
But the Lord God has determined such a thing for eternity through His order so that everything bad and false always destroys itself; and the more they begin to strive for autarchy, the sooner they will destroy themselves.
8
All the evil-doings of the people of this Earth resemble a slack machine which becomes all the more totally useless the more continually and actively it is used. The human body also becomes used up and destroys itself all the faster, the more passionately it is made active in its avaricious strivings
9
Therefore there is never a reason for a true philosopher of life not to believe in a true god, because he sees all the priesthoods performing adverse things and committing things which make his common sense want to repent. For the Lord allows all that; firstly, so that the true common sense becomes all the more awake to true activity, and secondly, so that the terrible things destroy themselves all the faster and are totally annihilated.
10
In the day no-one looks for a light and no-one even pays attention to the true value of it; for the cloak of night does not depress him in any way. In the day one can easily go for a stroll, because one can avoid every ditch, every stone on the street and every precipice, since one can see all that from far off. But in the dark of night things are quite different; then one can only proceed with effort and highly carefully!
11
How welcome is only a small flame of light to the traveller, which illuminates several steps along the path ahead for him in need, and with what longing will the light-loving traveller in the desert wait for the coming morning!
12
And behold, it is just the same for the spiritual lovers of light in the middle of a spiritual night, which for the most part brought the priests' disdainful avarice and the desire to dominate the often very gullible people; but the darker it becomes, the more the lack of light is noticed and the higher the full value of the spiritual light is treasured.
13
People, once they have been completely fully eclipsed through their upbringing from the cradle onwards, certainly do not notice the spiritual lack of light and feel quite comfortable among the blind comforts of their priests, who constantly know how to tell them a large number of edifying stories about people who are long since dead, it is true, but nonetheless who once lived piously and faithfully according to the statutes of the priests, which do this with the freshest colouring possible. That calms the totally blind completely; they often weep in sheer emotion and are made to feel quite placid, which naturally never brings the priests any harm.
14
Such people, as I said, feel the pressure of their spiritual night as little as a person totally blind from birth has ever felt the pressure of the very darkest night; for him the sun neither rises nor sets! But the night depresses in quite a different way a person who had been used to walking in the continuing light of the eternal day of truth and then has to begin to howl like the best singer among the wolves if he wants to keep his skin safe!
15
Imagine the situation when a few seeing people are in a community in which everyone is blind! Now one of the seers will begin, however, to give a description of the great magnificence of light and of its most magnificent spectrum of colours. The blind would immediately order him to be silent and call him a cheeky and malevolent liar, while he would be more than tangibly convinced of the brightest truth! Tell me, or consider, how then the seeing people would gradually begin to feel depressed, and particularly if the seers possessed the best means to make most of the blind in the whole community see, if only they wanted to! How would you with your pure common sense feel?"