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 76 -
The freedom of the human will.
Says Roklus: "Yes, Lord and Master over all things, if we only can perform as miracles everything that You alone want, and indeed everything in Your whole original and natural eternal order, then our own free will is purely nothing, and here and there with the very necessary miracles as the best and most effective proof of the power and strength of Your name it will then begin to look very thin on the Earth!
2
The miracles of Your will happen every day regardless of whether we also want them or not, and our will is therefore always equal to a completely hollow nut against Yours. The sun, the moon and the stars rise and set without our will; and likewise the Earth becomes green and brings forth its fruit; and the clouds move, and the winds play with the waves of the sea; and it becomes summer and winter, and times pass and never come again, quite without our will! Whether we now want that or not is all the same! But how are things then with the very often necessary special miracles?"
3
I say, "Yes, dear Roklus, it is still a little difficult to get to grips with you, because too many worldly concerns still reign in your mind!
4
Behold, whoever sets his hands on the plough and looks backwards, is still not prepared for the Kingdom of God! Do you think then that God in His clearest thinking and wanting is somehow as uniform and monotonous as the rigid ice of the north?
5
O man, first of all recognize God and His almighty will properly, and you will then also recognize whether a man with a heart full of the Divine Spirit is really unable to will or do anything else but - in silent patience resigned to the eternal will of God - let one day after another pass while he happily watches the various herbs grow and flower and again wither away.
6
If that would have been God's aim with the people, He never would have needed to give them their own free will, all He had to do was to simply let them grow like the mushrooms of the Earth with the roots stuck in the soil, just like sea polyps, if in human form; these would then have been able to look on day and night to see how the stars rise and set according to the will of God at least the way it seems, and how beautifully the grass grows around them! A free, changeable movement would not be necessary at all for them for they would in any case not have a free will, and the unchanging and stereotypical will of God could let them go much better as statues rather than as any pious person devoted to God with his will!
7
For despite all his aesthetics it can still come into the sense of a person who still has his own will and a free movement, to take a few steps across a beautiful grassy ground; and how inevitably must he then press the grass that has grown upright and standing into the ground according to the will and the eternal order of God and besides kill the life of a few grass mites before time! Do you then see the absurdity of your worry?
8
But now consider that a person for his physical nutrition does not only chew up with his teeth all sorts of magnificent fruits filled to brimming with fruit seeds and then consumes them as meals for his body without any mercy or compassion, but instead even attacks all sorts of animals, kills them and finally consumes their roasted flesh with a true avarice. Here and there he seeks great places where previously for many millennia the most beautiful grass, other healing herbs, bushes and trees have grown in the most beautiful and very most undisturbed order of God, and then builds dead houses and cities on this spot. Yes, friend, can that be just according to the order of God that you have thought of?
9
Or, if you shorten your nails, beard and hair that have grown too long with time, are you not acting against the order of God, according to whose stereotypical will nails, beard and hair grow again immediately and do not want to remain as short as you have decided yourselves with the scissors?
10
If God did not want at all some free-thinking and free-desiring being to act against the stereotype of His creating will and to make destructive attacks against the existing constantly unchangingly same order in big things as well as in small, would He have acted wisely to create beings that for the very sake of their existence are forced to make all sorts of destructive intrusions into the original order of creation, which is also a work of the same all-powerful and highly wise God?!
11
But if God, the Lord and Creator of all things and beings, allows the living beings, and namely the free-thinking people who are equipped with a free will, to destroy the forests, cut down the trees, build huts and houses out of it while burning the greatest part, trample His beautiful grass into the ground, mow it and feed it as hay to the cows, oxen, donkeys, sheep and goats and does not slap their hand for many other transgressions of His set order, how much less will He use His almighty will to put up opposition when it means developing man's little freedom of will into the greatest divine one.
12
Haven't you seen then how the boy, who is basically only a creation of God, turned the stone into gold before, against the stereotype of the divine will? Has anyone called him to account because he made such a violent attack on the basic order of God? On the contrary, only the divine will, united with that of the boy, brought him to do such a thing!
13
If you keep the easy commandments of God and truly love God above all, you will become obviously more united with the recognition and desires of God. You will become wiser and wiser and to the same degree also more powerful and insightful in desires. Your inner light from God will be raised to an all-seeing eye, with the means of which you will not only feel in the otherwise still dark life, but instead you will see the effective powers of life and through the possession of the freest will of God be able to decide them as well to be active in one way or another. But just in this way, that you recognize and see specially and individually the countless powers constantly coming from God, you can as a possessor of the divine will seize them and also determine them and bind them to some wise goal, and they will immediately be just as active as if God had determined them for some action Himself.
14
For all the powers that proceed from God through all the whole infinity are just like the countless arms of one and the same all-powerful God and can impossibly become and be active in any other way other than alone through the stimulus of the divine will, because they are basically nothing but pure emissions of the divine will.
15
If a man then joins his tiny freedom of will with the infinitely great divine one, tell Me whether it is then thinkable to make a mute observer of the pure divine will, or whether the crudely free willed person will be possible to perform some things with such a freedom of will from God!"