The Great Gospel of John
Volume 1
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
Second day in Sychar
- Chapter 79 -
At Sychar. Jonael's comments on the treatment of the soul-sick. Evil consequences of over-strictness. About the death penalty. Revenge by the departed. David's killed enemies as example. The blessedness of peace and friendship. Revenge by departed enemies.
Says the chief commander, completely taken in by Jonael's convincingly true discourse, 'Yes, now I am fully in the clear, and I shall desist from my design, and shall do it only if prompted by you; and you shall therefore be a God-sent alderman to this community, with priority in all things. I shall henceforth do nothing without your counsel.'
2
Says Jonael, 'Good so, and worthy of the Lord's pleasure! Where someone is sick in body, help shall be provided; if however there be anyone sick in soul, psychic help shall be provided in line with the sickness!
3
The soul-maladies of children can best be cured through a good discipline where the rod should not be missing. The soul-maladies of adults, however, are cured through wise and loving counsel, through thorough teaching and instruction and pure love-motivated admonitions and drawing of the attention to the inevitable bad consequences that must arise in the near future if the soul's weaknesses are retained. If with very stubborn, ie, blind and deaf souls, this has no effect, only then would it be time to subject such being to a more severe and strict treatment, at the bottom of which, however, love for the fellowman must be present in abundance, for the blessing of a more sever treatment can result only from that.
4
If, however, the leaders act only from anger and a hellish vengefulness, then their effort is futile. Instead of healing the ones with sick souls to become true men, they are turned into devils, whose vengefulness in future no power will be able to appease.
5
For a time Satan can be restrained by might and force from above, but if the Lord - for the sake of arrogant men who think that by their power and wisdom consisting in relentless tyrannical severity they are capable of preserving the order that suits them - withdraws His might and frees Satan from his fetters, then there will be overnight an end to the power of those who imagine themselves so powerful. For the people who by such wrong treatment have been turned into real devils will like a swollen stream fall upon them and destroy them as if they had never existed.
6
The worst effect has capital punishment. For what is the use to kill a person's body if one cannot keep this soul and spirit captive, wherein dwells the real force for acting and accomplishing?
7
Whoever believes that he has rid himself of his enemy when he has slain his body is smitten with tenfold blindness. For thereby he made for himself from a weak enemy whom he could see, a thousand invisible ones, who persecute him day and night and harm him in body, soul and spirit.
8
Look at a war where not seldom many thousands are bodily slain. The victor believes in his blindness that he has rid himself of his enemies whose bodies he has destroyed. But what a mighty error that is! The souls and spirits of the slain, thanks to their direct influence on the earth's weather, devastate during several years the various crops thereby inevitably calling forth high cost of foods which causes famine and all kinds of fatal epidemics and pestilence. These then within a short time snatch away more people than soldiers of the enemy had been slain. Now weakened in the power his land should give him, he must, in order to exist, hire for a high price mercenaries from foreign lands. Thereby he and his land run into debt, and when after some years he has completely impoverished his land and people and can no longer pay his debts and soldiers, he will soon be persecuted and cursed from all sides. His people, whom he conquered, will, driven by excessive misery, rise against him and the external enemies will not let this opportunity pass and wage war on him. And he, the celebrated victor, will in such a fight never be crowned victor, but despair will seize him with the claws of a tiger and mangle him spiritually to the innermost fibre of his life.
9
And look, all this is the doings of bodily slain enemies.
10
Therefore, it is an ancient rule and custom that when a person is physically dying, all those close to him make their peace with him and have him bless them, for if he dies as somebody's enemy, the one who survives him as his enemy is to be pitied. Firstly, the liberated soul will torment the survivor's mind uninterruptedly through unbearable pangs of conscience and then it will arrange all the survivor's earthly circumstances in such a way that he will hardly be able to get on in the world.
11
The Lord allows all this so that the offended souls may receive the satisfaction they demand and, besides, it is incalculably better for the survivor to be already in this material world tormented for his actions of pride than if he after the death of his body promptly fell into a hundred thousand hands of hostile spirits who would certainly not treat him kindly, as one completely inexperienced in that world.
12
That is why it is so extremely important to practice in this world love and true friendship, to do good to any enemy rather than harm him and to bless the one who curses me, for I cannot know when the Lord will call him away from this world. If he was in this world my enemy only in small, insignificant things, afterwards as a spirit he will become that in great things.
13
Since his childhood David was a man according to Jehovah's own heart, but against the Lord's will he had made an enemy of one man, namely Urias; and what a terrible revenge, with the Lord's permission, Urias' spirit had then taken David. And that is and remains always the certain consequence of a hostile act against a person opposing God's will.
14
It is, of course, quite a different thing if the Lord Himself bids you do it, as He bade David beat with martial force and physically destroy the Philistines who had already become satanic enemies of God and men. These are in the beyond immediately subjected to a hard judgment and cannot ever rise against God's arm, for they are humiliated by the Lord's might.
15
However, it is quite different with those enemies you made for yourself against God's will, possibly through your pride or the most imperfect, man-devised justice about which goes the saying that the greatest right is at the same time the greatest wrong. These will, once they have shed their bodies, become your most irreconcilable enemies.
16
I would give you a thousand lives, if I had them, if you could show me in the world one happy person who had an enemy precede him into the other world. I have not met such a one. But I do know cases where the revenge of a spirit who had become hostile to a family extended to the tenth generation; also where people in a land or region had been treated very badly, they had then as spirits devastated such a land or region for many years, sometimes even permanently, so that men could no longer live there. Friend, although this my well-meant precept may sound quite unbelievable to you, it is still irrefutably right. If it were not so, how could I ever dare give it to you before the Lord and His angels? But if you should entertain any doubt, do turn to the Lord, the eternal Creator of all things, and He will bear you a fully valid witness to the absolute truth of what I have told you.'