God's New Bible

The Great Gospel of John
Volume 3

Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
Jesus near Caesarea Philippi

- Chapter 14 -

How earthly treasures should be regarded and used.

1
(The Lord) "Look at me! Must I now not associate with the world? I eat and drink, and the world serves Me as once the flood served Noah"s box! Well, may it rage violently under the strong walls of My box - but it can never engulf it!
2
You are not to blame that a Roman empire has come into being. But now it is here, and you cannot destroy it! The kingdom however has good laws which serve well for the maintenance of order and the humility of the people. If you are considering becoming a lord who is above the law and therefore can wear a crown, then you are on the wrong path for yourself, if not in comparison with the people who have to obey the law once it has been sanctioned with all its advantages and disadvantages. But if you put yourself beneath the law and consider yourself simply as the leader decided by the state and by necessity, then you are at the correct point of view building for yourself out of the spiritual material of the law an ark which has to carry you over the stormy flood of the sins of the world!
3
If, in addition, you observe the basic conditions of My teaching which are in actuality very easy and go along well with your laws, then you are doing enough for your soul and for your spirit. But if I tell you that is enough, then name Me someone else who could tell you that it is not enough!"
4
Cyrenius says, "But consider, oh Lord, the splendor and the luxury in which I must live for the sake of the State, and consider what You have just said about the splendor and the luxury of the world!"
5
I say, "Do you love in your heart the splendor and the luxury of the world?"
6
Cyrenius answers, "Oh, not in the least; it is all a quite an ordeal for me!"
7
I say, "Well, how does this forced splendor and luxury confuse you? No glory and no decoration can be a detriment for the soul and the spirit if your heart does not love it! But if your heart longs for something material and would be nothing without it, then it can be just as harmful for the soul and the spirit as the heaviest crown of pure gold and of the most valuable gemstones.
8
Thus everything depends on the state of the heart; for otherwise ridiculously the sun, moon and all the stars would have to be counted as sins to the people of this Earth because they shine and glisten very magnificently and because man certainly has joy in it. So you, My dear Cyrenius, can take great joy in your glory before the people, but no vain or foolish joy, for through that your soul is spoiled and finally killed!
9
Even Solomon was allowed and even ordered to dress with such splendor as no king before him ever wore and no king after him will ever wear. As long as he had no foolish, vain joy in this, instead a correct one founded in wisdom, the joy was uplifting for his soul and his spirit. But when he became vain as a consequence of the great glitter and this haughtiness had taken control of him, then he sank before God in all things and all better people and fell into all sins of the luxurious world and his works and deeds became acts of foolishness for the better people and true abhorrence in the face of God.
10
I tell you and all the others that it is good and even useful for a person if he imitates the splendor of heaven on this Earth in his soul and spirit and lifts up his mood in the correct way; for it is more worthy of praise to build than to destroy. But only mature people in terms of soul and spirit should do such a thing so that the immature will see what one can do as a mature person.
11
But whoever builds a palace in his own honor and for his own reputation and loves himself for his splendor, he commits a great sin against his soul and against the divine spirit in him and spoils himself and all his descendents who consider themselves from their birth to be better than other people.
12
But if the hearts of the inhabitants of the palaces are spoilt through the splendor of the palaces and thereby become full of arrogance and full of contempt towards the people who cannot inhabit a palace, then it is better to turn the palace immediately into a scrapheap.
13
So it is also not against the divine order to build a city in which people live together in peace and harmony like a family in one house live, work and deal and in all things support each other more easily than if they live hours away from each other. But if there is arrogance, luxury, splendor, envy, hate, persecution and even manslaughter, and indulgence, fornication and lethargy, then such a city should be turned into a heap of scrap and decay, otherwise it becomes a field for all sorts of arch evils which with time will poison the whole Earth through and through like the pre-flood Hanoch and the after-flood Babylon and the great city Nineveh! How great were these cities once, and now a few pitiful huts stand in their place! But where Hanoch once stood, there is now a lake, like in the place of Sodom and Gomorrah and the ten smaller towns in the area of the two larger ones, each of which was larger than today"s Jerusalem, which is also not as large as it was in the time of David.
14
What happened to these towns will also happen to Jerusalem, and these are the people who will see the pain of destruction and will enjoy it! For as I said, it is better to have no beautiful cities but more fully alive souls than a city in which the people"s souls have been completely destroyed for all eternity!
15
So you, dear Cyrenius, may have everything valuable and wonderfully beautiful that the Earth carries on its wide ground, and you can delight in them, praising and worshipping God. But never set your heart on it; for all these splendors of the Earth must one day disappear if you mistake the temporal with the eternal! For everything material is basically nothing but what I clearly told you in a previous conversation. - Tell Me, are you satisfied and have you understood this in the way it must be understood before God and all the world?"

Footnotes