The Great Gospel of John
Volume 6
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
The Lord and the Priests of the Temple (John 5)
- Chapter 29 -
The extent of power.
1
(The Lord:) "Now let us also take into consideration the magnitude of a purely spiritual force as compared to the magnitude of the greatest physical force. What will be the result? Behold, there are in infinite cosmic space gigantic solar worlds, compared to whose size this whole great earth would be like a tiny grain of sand in relation to the whole earth. Look, a wind blowing across the earth's sand steppes already lifts such sand up and with great ease carries it away, and a gale does it all the more easily in great masses. Now imagine a comparatively strong wind on that immense solar world. Quite obviously it would have easy play with earths such as this. 'Well,' you would say in your worldly wisdom, `if such mighty winds are blowing there, surely one should feel something of them down here on earth.' And I tell you that this happens quite often, and from even much further away!
2
You will have seen the flying stars. Some of them are often so big that they could be called a small earth. This is sometimes cosmic dust blown out into the vast space of ether from the solar worlds through subterranean gales. This cosmic dust falls back to where it had come from on account of the great attractive force of such a solar world, unless it came too close to another cosmic globe which would then attract it. But this does not happen often.
3
There you see the immense exponentiation of the material, so-called natural forces at work in endless space. Yet even if you exponentiate these and other natural forces known to you incessantly for a thousand and a million years, the ultimate potency of force found by you will, compared with the divine omnipotence, always be like a mere naught as compared with something real, or like a falsehood as compared with the truth.
4
Just as no natural power, no matter how many times exponentiated, can ever be compared with the divine power, it also cannot be compared with the power of any pure angel-spirit.
5
Therefore, since there is nowhere in space and in time a force comparable to the power of an angel, this spiritual force thus must also exist outside of or beyond all space and all time, although existing as idiosyncratically in itself isolated independent in space and time, however everywhere free and independent of both, only having an all-guiding connection with space and time by an inner and living correspondence.
6
To illustrate even more clearly the infinite superiority of the divine-spiritual force over all the greatest natural forces, I merely have to tell you: If all the greatest physical forces put together wrought havoc throughout the vast spaces of creation for myriads and eons of earth years, they would yet be unable to destroy one atom in the whole of creation against the might of the divine will. However, if God were to allow it, an angel-spirit would be capable of doing it in an instant, so that he only had to will it and the whole endless space would become completely devoid of any material creation and neither a sun nor an earth could continue to exist in the same.
7
Tell me, Philopold, whether it begins to dawn on you that God and everything of a heavenly and purely spiritual nature is totally outside of time and space and therefore is - and must be - existing in itself, because without this no material creature could ever have come into existence."