The Childhood of Jesus
The Gospel of James
Biographical Gospel of the Lord
- Chapter 299 -
And He Increased In Grace And Wisdom
NOW IT IS WRITTEN in the Scripture: And He increased in grace and wisdom before God and men and remained subservient and obedient to His parents, until He began His ministry.
2
Question: How could Jesus, as the only eternal Supreme Being, increase in grace and wisdom before God and men, when He actually was God from eternity;
3
and how especially before men, since He was the infinitely most perfect Being from eternity?
4
To understand this correctly, Jesus must not be looked upon exclusively as the only God;
5
but He must be seen as a man in whom the sole eternal Deity imprisoned Itself as seemingly inactive, just as the spirit is imprisoned in the nature of every man.
6
And what every man must do according to the divine order to free the spirit within himself,
7
that the man Jesus also had to do in all earnestness in order to free the Supreme Being within himself, so that he might become one with Him.
8
Now every man must carry certain weaknesses within himself, which are the common bonds of the spirit by which it is confined as though within a tight shell.
9
These bonds can only be burst asunder when the soul, which is entwined with the flesh, has so strengthened itself through the proper amount of self-denial that it is stable enough to perceive and to hold the free spirit.
10
This is why man can only become aware of his weaknesses by suffering all manner of temptations and thus discover how and wherein his spirit is fettered.
11
And when he thereupon denies himself in his soul in these very matters, he thereby frees his spirit of its bonds and binds his soul therewith.
12
And when, in the course of time, the soul is bound with all the former bonds of the spirit, the completely unfettered spirit quite naturally unites with the entire, now strong soul,
13
and the latter thereby enters into all perfect, heavenly power of the spirit and thus becomes wholly one with the spirit forever.
14
For the loosening of one bond after the other constitutes the soul's increase in spiritual strength, which is God's wisdom and God's grace.
15
God's wisdom consists in the clear beholding of God's eternal order within the self, and His grace in recognizing His eternal light of love, by means of which all of the endless and innumerable things, the conditions of their existence and their paths are illuminated.
16
And as is the case with man, so it also was with the God-man Jesus.
17
His soul was like that of every man and was fettered with all the more weaknesses because the most powerful Spirit of God had to bind Himself with the mightiest of bonds so He could be contained within His soul.
18
Thus the soul of Jesus also had to withstand the greatest temptations and deny itself in order to take the bonds off its God-Spirit and to gird itself therewith for the infinite freedom of the Spirit of all spirits, so it could become wholly one with Him.
19
And in just this did the increase in the wisdom and the grace of the soul of Jesus before God and men consist, and that in such measure that the God-Spirit gradually and ever more and more united Himself with His in fact divine soul, which was called the Son of God.