What God said about praying: God did NOT say, "I AM THAT I AM." Fix your theology, fix your philosophy, and fix your life: find salvation and healing by reading Exodus 3: 14 CORRECTLY and doing what God said to do.
I
believe absolutely the eternal self-existence of Triune God and
the inerrancy of the scriptures as they were written by the prophets. I
have reason
to believe that Moses did not say in Exodus 3: 14 that God explained his existence as "I AM THAT I AM."
I believe that the ancient Aramaic text more accurately reflects what Moses actually wrote than the current Hebrew text. The ancient Jewish sopherim had very good reason to change the text from what Moses said to what it suggests now, for they certainly could not accept its implication of God's physicality (anthropopatheia: the ascribing to God what belongs to human and rational beings, irrational creatures, or inanimate things; see Bullinger, The Companion Bible, appendixes 6 and 33). Wherever that occurred, they cut or changed it.
Even though it is not on any list of emendations by the sopherim, I believe Exodus 3: 14 originally had such a strong implication of God's physicality that the sopherim had to change it (else their theology wouldn't work; nor will western Christianity's), and that change occurred after the Aramaic text was created, leaving the Aramaic scripture the only harbinger of the original. This is one of the "bennies" of reading Victor Alexander's translation of the ancient Aramaic text (see v-a.com/bible).
I think all can agree on the eternal self-existence of the ineffable Most High God--the Source and uncaused First Cause of all implied by "I AM THAT I AM." We wouldn't bother to worship God as God otherwise. But neither his existence nor his name was what God was talking to Moses about. What God was talking to Moses about was his nature (Hebrew: shem). Shem means a thing's nature, and our theology is way off because God's nature is revealed by what he does, which was revealed in Exodus 3: 14 before it was changed.
In Exodus 3: 14, God effectively explained praying (which is our doing what he does), and we are supposed to read the passage as such. He said in effect, "This is how we jethro (create expansion/increase)." Because this implied that he, God, had become us, it blew the sopherim's minds and they could not accept it: "No, no, no. That cannot be right. We have got to fix this."
Moses was a spiritually aware man. That is what 'Moses', "a son born," means. Being spiritually perceptive, he was fascinated by jethro. Jethro means "jutting over the brim." We call it excellence, abundance, wealth, increase, healing and prosperity. Jethro is abundant provision. It is also a miracle. The miracle part fascinated Moses.
"What is up with that?" he wondered. "In the middle of a drought, a guy plants the last of his seed in faith . . . and reaps a hundred-fold. That kind of increase is not normal . . . except when the guy does it in faith--then it seems to happen all the time." Moses perceived that the increase was providential--God directed. He surmised that where he could find jethro working was where he could find God.
But what were the mechanics of it? Where do you put in the gas and what makes it work "under the hood"? What indicates that it is working? Moses knew it had something to do with faith. Hmmm.
God wants to be known. He descended to ascend, and our ignorance is his main hold-up. Moses had followed his thoughts of jethro about as far as he humanly could and finally came to the end of his thinking. Finally, he shut up. Then God could proceed to talk about ascending (God's inclusive transcendence is a two-way street, and he wants to get us moving toward the goal).
"You want to find the power, the mechanism that will afford you a serene, prosperous, healthy, and spiritually progressive life? You want not famine and hardship but to be constantly in the heart of jethro--'the land of milk and honey'--the perfect country?"
I believe that the ancient Aramaic text more accurately reflects what Moses actually wrote than the current Hebrew text. The ancient Jewish sopherim had very good reason to change the text from what Moses said to what it suggests now, for they certainly could not accept its implication of God's physicality (anthropopatheia: the ascribing to God what belongs to human and rational beings, irrational creatures, or inanimate things; see Bullinger, The Companion Bible, appendixes 6 and 33). Wherever that occurred, they cut or changed it.
Even though it is not on any list of emendations by the sopherim, I believe Exodus 3: 14 originally had such a strong implication of God's physicality that the sopherim had to change it (else their theology wouldn't work; nor will western Christianity's), and that change occurred after the Aramaic text was created, leaving the Aramaic scripture the only harbinger of the original. This is one of the "bennies" of reading Victor Alexander's translation of the ancient Aramaic text (see v-a.com/bible).
I think all can agree on the eternal self-existence of the ineffable Most High God--the Source and uncaused First Cause of all implied by "I AM THAT I AM." We wouldn't bother to worship God as God otherwise. But neither his existence nor his name was what God was talking to Moses about. What God was talking to Moses about was his nature (Hebrew: shem). Shem means a thing's nature, and our theology is way off because God's nature is revealed by what he does, which was revealed in Exodus 3: 14 before it was changed.
In Exodus 3: 14, God effectively explained praying (which is our doing what he does), and we are supposed to read the passage as such. He said in effect, "This is how we jethro (create expansion/increase)." Because this implied that he, God, had become us, it blew the sopherim's minds and they could not accept it: "No, no, no. That cannot be right. We have got to fix this."
Moses was a spiritually aware man. That is what 'Moses', "a son born," means. Being spiritually perceptive, he was fascinated by jethro. Jethro means "jutting over the brim." We call it excellence, abundance, wealth, increase, healing and prosperity. Jethro is abundant provision. It is also a miracle. The miracle part fascinated Moses.
"What is up with that?" he wondered. "In the middle of a drought, a guy plants the last of his seed in faith . . . and reaps a hundred-fold. That kind of increase is not normal . . . except when the guy does it in faith--then it seems to happen all the time." Moses perceived that the increase was providential--God directed. He surmised that where he could find jethro working was where he could find God.
But what were the mechanics of it? Where do you put in the gas and what makes it work "under the hood"? What indicates that it is working? Moses knew it had something to do with faith. Hmmm.
God wants to be known. He descended to ascend, and our ignorance is his main hold-up. Moses had followed his thoughts of jethro about as far as he humanly could and finally came to the end of his thinking. Finally, he shut up. Then God could proceed to talk about ascending (God's inclusive transcendence is a two-way street, and he wants to get us moving toward the goal).
"You want to find the power, the mechanism that will afford you a serene, prosperous, healthy, and spiritually progressive life? You want not famine and hardship but to be constantly in the heart of jethro--'the land of milk and honey'--the perfect country?"
Then the big doctrinal bomb: "Ahiyeh Ashur hiyeh," the mechanics of effective praying--how to utilize God's nature by faith: "You become what you want in mind, and by vivid, strong imagining it becomes manifest."
'Ahiyeh': It is God's nature to increase, to expand, to become. "I come in my becoming."
'Ashur': It is God's nature to imagine and to believe. "I create what I want in my mind. What I imagine IS real."
'Hiyeh': It is God's nature to expand, to manifest in reality what he would have and be. "I become his becoming."
You can take it to the bank: this is how God creates the world: he defines it, he imagines it, and he becomes it. And he has become us: the one him is in all of us. "He who imagined human imaginations has become human imaginations." You and I are the Father, Jesus Christ, the Manifestation and the Creator of the world, though in our ignorance and confusion we think we are the human flesh. All of us together are a single entity in action: YHWH (Jehovah).
This is what theology is supposed to reflect. The awareness of being that we are inside (the "I think, therefore I am" guy) is the same God who created the world and inspired the prophets. From God's level of awareness we "flipped" to man's, which is abject ignorance (we had to forget all our past to begin the process of learning the Ineffable's rightness, freedom and independence, which is pretty much our over-all goal).
Human imaginations are the voluntarily self-ignoranced power and wisdom of God. We became this in order to enjoy the generation of ascendance we prophesied as God before we flipped into this life of death (i.e., complete forgetting). The Bible we inspired was to smarten us back up to the Law, which is the NATURE of God into whom we are ascending.
Jesus Christ is the spirit (in us) of prophecy of that ascendance; the Holy Spirit beings the Law, God's nature, to our remembrance. That is not intellectual Bible knowledge but the ecstasy of spirit experience. Everything we prophesied will come to pass, for in the volume of our book it is written of us. It is all about the ascendance to the completed spirit-state of Man.
If Moses' "resting in the Lord" (meditation) was Noah, Ahiyeh, Ashur and hiyeh were Shem, Ham and Japheth. The "burning" bush who confronted Moses was the same Shining One who confronted Adam. To whom has the Arm of the Lord been revealed? To Moses. We are all sons born.
The children of Israel enslaved in Egypt are our godly imaginings constrained by the stupidity of thinking that our consciousness is of the flesh: "When my thoughts towards faith consider, 'What is His nature?' what should I remind myself?"
Just as Abel and Jacob were the spiritual sides of Cain and Esau, Israel is our spiritual side, our God-ward thoughts. Egypt is the ignorance our minds are stuck in, our thinking that we are human flesh instead of God's spirit who is making the flesh to live. God will destroy this ignorance to display his Glory in us. In the Hebrew compound word 'Israel', God is the doer of the verb part of the word: man ruling. The divine in us will win out and usurp the world of flesh.
We are becoming the ascended, perfect man. It is our irrevocable destiny, for Christ is risen in the planned end, and we are Christ going to that end.
So, Ahiyeh Ashur hiyeh: become in vivid, impassioned imagining what you want to exist as . . . with the confidence that it IS. We become the experience we created manifested in the world.
____________
Some of my resources:
From Bullinger's The Companion Bible margin note on Genesis 1, verse 2, I learned that the single Hebrew word hayah was translated as is, am, was, become, come to pass, to be, etc., all of which carry the sense of become. All carry the idea of transition from one state to another. Bullinger's note on Genesis 32, verse 28, mentions God being the doer of the verb in Hebrew compound names. Strong's notes that 'name' in Hebrew means nature. The "names" are natures we shall pass through.
From Victor Alexander's Exodus: a translation from the ancient Aramaic margin note on Exodus 3: 14, I learned, well, this:
*3:14 Lit. Aramaic: (1) "Ahiyeh": "the One Who Comes in His Coming," the absolute sense of "the One Who Comes." (2) "Ashur": "the Beginning Spark that kindles the Fire" or "the Light." (3) "Hiyeh": "His Coming." (4) "Ahiyeh" and "hiyeh" are related forms of the same word. They mean more than "the Coming." They signify also the "Eternal Presence," "the Ever-Present," and the "Never Ceasing Intent of the Comer to Come." (5) In the same way, "Ashur" signifies "the Uncreated Creator who Creates Everything from Nothing." (6) Also, "Ashur" signifies: "Above-the-Flames." (See v-a.com/bible)
From Neville Goddard I learned that God is one, us and imagination. Everything Neville wrote and spoke is available free on the Internet, and hundreds of people are making a living selling his public domain materials. Protect your computer from viruses.
One of Neville's most important contributions is the idea of revision. Because our imaginations are the divine being who created us and became us, we also create our worlds. And because we are in ignorance, many of us have screwed up royally. But we can revise the past and unscrew our worlds by reliving the past in our minds and imagining it right. This is why life seems to go in cycles. What we did comes around again in the future for another go at it. We cycle through revision after revision in the course of our lives until we get it right. Neville covers this thoroughly in The Pruning Shears of Revision. (See also The Best, Most Practical of Neville's Lectures http://imagicworldview.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-best-most-practical-neville-goddard.html)
Neville meditated as a Jew trained in mysticism. He said he would go into a sleepy, drowsy state and enjoy watching a light blue flame, like alcohol burning, which seemed to float in his closed eyes. When he achieved the sense of also floating as the divine consciousness within, he would imagine exactly the experience he would like to have as though he were actually experiencing it. The trick, he said, was to form in the imagination some scene which would imply that he had already received what he wanted, and then keep repeating that scene over and over and over "until it took on all the tones of reality." And then, if possible, he would fall asleep in that dream.
If I am right about this being the thrust of the scriptures, it seems to me that millions, even billions of people would benefit from learning this technique of mystical praying and the theology behind it.
Some of my resources:
From Bullinger's The Companion Bible margin note on Genesis 1, verse 2, I learned that the single Hebrew word hayah was translated as is, am, was, become, come to pass, to be, etc., all of which carry the sense of become. All carry the idea of transition from one state to another. Bullinger's note on Genesis 32, verse 28, mentions God being the doer of the verb in Hebrew compound names. Strong's notes that 'name' in Hebrew means nature. The "names" are natures we shall pass through.
From Victor Alexander's Exodus: a translation from the ancient Aramaic margin note on Exodus 3: 14, I learned, well, this:
*3:14 Lit. Aramaic: (1) "Ahiyeh": "the One Who Comes in His Coming," the absolute sense of "the One Who Comes." (2) "Ashur": "the Beginning Spark that kindles the Fire" or "the Light." (3) "Hiyeh": "His Coming." (4) "Ahiyeh" and "hiyeh" are related forms of the same word. They mean more than "the Coming." They signify also the "Eternal Presence," "the Ever-Present," and the "Never Ceasing Intent of the Comer to Come." (5) In the same way, "Ashur" signifies "the Uncreated Creator who Creates Everything from Nothing." (6) Also, "Ashur" signifies: "Above-the-Flames." (See v-a.com/bible)
From Neville Goddard I learned that God is one, us and imagination. Everything Neville wrote and spoke is available free on the Internet, and hundreds of people are making a living selling his public domain materials. Protect your computer from viruses.
One of Neville's most important contributions is the idea of revision. Because our imaginations are the divine being who created us and became us, we also create our worlds. And because we are in ignorance, many of us have screwed up royally. But we can revise the past and unscrew our worlds by reliving the past in our minds and imagining it right. This is why life seems to go in cycles. What we did comes around again in the future for another go at it. We cycle through revision after revision in the course of our lives until we get it right. Neville covers this thoroughly in The Pruning Shears of Revision. (See also The Best, Most Practical of Neville's Lectures http://imagicworldview.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-best-most-practical-neville-goddard.html)
Neville meditated as a Jew trained in mysticism. He said he would go into a sleepy, drowsy state and enjoy watching a light blue flame, like alcohol burning, which seemed to float in his closed eyes. When he achieved the sense of also floating as the divine consciousness within, he would imagine exactly the experience he would like to have as though he were actually experiencing it. The trick, he said, was to form in the imagination some scene which would imply that he had already received what he wanted, and then keep repeating that scene over and over and over "until it took on all the tones of reality." And then, if possible, he would fall asleep in that dream.
If I am right about this being the thrust of the scriptures, it seems to me that millions, even billions of people would benefit from learning this technique of mystical praying and the theology behind it.
posted by Daniel C. Branham-Steele at
8:16 PM
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