Neville Goddard's Hidden Little Book: Resurrection

Our promised reward, euaggelion, is GOD's Resurrection, IF we join HIM in agreement that THIS life is HIS life resurrected!!

In 1966, Neville compiled five of his small books: Prayer - The Art of Believing, Feeling is the Secret, Freedom for All, Out of This World, and Resurrection, into one volume: Resurrection. Got it? The overall collection and the last small book within it have the same title, Resurrection.

The little book suddenly became important to me when I realized that what the Ineffable wants of us is for us to be It. We are Its actual Manifestation, and It loves us because It loves Itself. It died of what It was to become us that we might become It. IT. WANTS. TO. RESURRECT. US. INTO. WHAT. IT. IS. BECAUSE. IT. LOVES. IT. AND. WE. ARE. IT. That is what this life business is all about.

I tried to find online a PDF of this little public domain book, and could only find it in PDFs of the big Resurrection. Seems it hasn't been published separately anywhere. Long story short: I cut and pasted the little Resurrection into Blogger and am working on formatting it.

So what is the matter? I believe the ancient meaning of the Greek word euaggelon ('euangelion'), which is translated in the Bible as "gospel," was "reward." "The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the reward (that reward being our promised resurrection to Godhood)," makes a lot more sense than "The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the story about me." The reward which is confirmed with signs, wonders, and demonstrations of power is our at-hand RESURRECTION: "It's here!"

I am afraid many of Neville's followers are working just on manifesting their prosperity instead of their promise. Abraham, noted by Neville below, believed God that Sarah, an old woman, would resurrect to a young woman to bear his child. And she did (see Genesis 17) - so they laughed for joy. Nebuchadnezzar was given by God all the world he could take, and got his prideful nose rubbed in the dirt for seven long years (see Daniel 4). There are two ways we can go. Choose well.

Here is Neville's little book on what God is doing, life, Resurrection!

RESURRECTION: A CONFESSION OF FAITH IN TERMS OF EXPERIENCE

By Neville

1966

"Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel." — Mark 1:14-15

Jesus' ministry began after that of John ended in Judea. "Jesus, when He began His ministry, was about thirty years of age." — Luke 3:23

The soil of the centuries had been ploughed and harrowed for the gospel of God. And men began to experience God's plan of salvation.

The authors of the gospel of God are anonymous, and all that we can really know about them must be derived from our own experience of scripture. Their authority was not in scripture as a dead written code but in their own experience of scripture. Their gospel was not a new religion but the fulfillment of one as old as the faith of Abraham. "And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham" (Gal. 3:8). And Abraham believed God and lived in accordance with the preview of the story of salvation that God granted to him.

The unknown authors of the gospel emphasize the fulfillment of scripture in the life of Jesus Christ. Christ in us fulfills the scripture. "Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?" (2 Cor. 13:5). "I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives in me" (Gal. 2:20). "For if we have been united with Him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like his" (Rom. 6:4).

The repetition in us, through His indwelling, has been expressed by Johann Scheffler, a seventeenth-century mystic.

   "Though Christ a thousand times
       In Bethlehem be born,
    If He's not born in thee,
      Thy soul is still forlorn."
                        — Edward Thomas

"And He said to them, 'O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into His glory?' And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, He interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning Himself... everything written about Me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled. Then He opened their minds to understand the scriptures" (Luke 24:25-27, 44-45).

"And they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading" (Nehemiah 8:8).

The Old Testament is a prophetic blueprint of the life of Jesus Christ. The gospel of God is the revelation of the future granted to Abraham. "Abraham rejoiced that he was to see My day" (John 8:56). It is about the risen Christ. Participation in the life of the age to come depends on God's act of raising the dead. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is God's victory. That we shall be "united with Him in a resurrection like His" is the promise of God's victory for all.

But before the day of victory, man must be refined in the furnace of affliction. "I have tried you in the furnace of affliction. For My own sake, for My own sake, I do it, for how should My Name be profaned? My glory I will not give to another" (Isaiah 48:10-11). It takes the furnace of affliction to conform us to the image of His Son, and therefore to the image of the Father, for the Father and the Son are one.

"Then came to him all his brothers and sisters and all who had known him before... and comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him... And the Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning" (Job 42:11-12). The story of Job is the story of man, the innocent victim of a cruel experiment on the part of God. "And God said, 'Let us make man in our image'" (Gen. 1:26). Yet "I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed in us" (Rom. 8:18) and that glory is nothing less than the unveiling of God the Father in us, as us.

Nothing can take the place of personal witness to God's plan of salvation. The plan of the mystery is inherent in the creation. What is so prophetically spoken to the world in the Old Testament is realized in one's own personality. All was foretold me but naught could I foresee, but I learned who Jesus Christ really is after the story was re-enacted in me.

The man who has experienced Scripture cannot escape the responsibility of telling its meaning to his fellow men. The unknown writers of the gospel of God were not describing situations and events of the past as historians. Their story of Jesus Christ is their own experience of God's plan of redemption as men who themselves had experienced redemption. They related their own experiences. They are witnesses of the first order testifying to the truth of God's Word, not hesitating to interpret the Old Testament according to their own supernatural experiences.

Having experienced the story of salvation I can add my testimony to theirs and say that all is done as they have told it. Their experiences, thus attested, confront men with the responsibility of accepting or rejecting their interpretation of the Old Testament. Their testimony should be heard and responded to. One must experience Scripture for himself before he can begin to understand how wonderful it is. They give no account of the personal appearance of Jesus, because when the story of salvation is recreated in man, man will know that "I am He"[Luke 22:70; John 4:26; 8:18; 8:24; 8:28; 13:19; 18:5,6]. "He who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with Him" (1 Cor. 6:17).

* * *

"Being in the form of God,… He emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even death on the cross" (Phil. 2:6-8) of man. He abdicated His divine form and assumed the form of a slave. He did not merely disguise Himself as a slave but became one, subject to all human weaknesses and limitations. God who entered death's door, the human skull, Golgotha, is now the world's Savior. God is our salvation. "Our God is a God of salvation; and to God, the Lord, belongs escape from death" (Ps. 68:19-20). "Unless I die thou canst not live; But if I die I shall arise again and thou with Me" [William Blake's Jerusalem, Chapter 4: Plate 96]. The grain of wheat sets out the mystery of life through death. "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit" (John 12:24). This is the secret of God's plan of salvation. God achieves His purpose by self-limitation, by contraction in order to expand. God Himself enters Death's Door, my skull, and lays down in the Grave with me. And with apologies to William Blake

    "What'er is done to me I cannot know,
     And if you'll ask me I will swear it so.
     Whether 'tis good or evil none's to blame:
     Only God can take the pride, only God the shame."

"And I am sure that He who began a good work in me will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ" (Phil. 1:6). When the image of the unbegotten is formed in me, then He who was so long tightly furled within me, unwinds Himself, and I am He. "No one has ascended into Heaven but He who descended from heaven, the Son of Man" (John 3:13). God Himself voluntarily descended into His grave Golgotha, my skull. "I lay down My life, that I may take it again. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of My own accord" (John 10:17-18). "For your maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is His Name" (Isa. 54:5). And, "He cleaves to his wife and they become one flesh" (Gen. 2:24). For, "He who is united to the Lord becomes one Spirit with Him" (1 Cor. 6:17). "What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder" (Mark 10:9). Man is God's emanation, yet his wife till the sleep of death is past. "Rouse thyself! Why sleepest thou Lord? Awake!" (Ps. 44:23). When He awakes, "I am He." God laid Himself down within me to sleep, and as He slept He dreamed a dream; He dreamed that He is I and when He awakes I am He. But how do I know that I am He? Through the revelation of His Son David who in the Spirit calls me Father.

* * *

"I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by Me… He who has seen Me has seen the Father" (John 14:6-9). Union with the risen Christ is the only way to the Father. Because, "Christ and the Father are one" (John 10:30). The way leads through death to life eternal.

Man's search for Christ as the authority which he can trust, which he can respect, to which he can submit is his longing for the Father That lives in him, for That same Father Whom the Christ of the Gospel claims to be. The Christ of the Gospel is the Eternal Father in man. This longing for the Father is the cry of man that ends the New Testament. "Come, Lord Jesus!" (Rev. 22:20). "Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?" (2 Cor. 13:5). "And in Him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily?" (Col. 2:9), not figuratively, but genuinely in a body. This is "the mystery hidden for ages and generations which is Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Col. 1:26,27).

Imperfect knowledge of Jesus has blinded man to the true nature of the Father. The Lord Jesus is God the Father Who became man that man might become the Lord Jesus, the Father. Historian's researches cannot yield knowledge of who the Father is. "No one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit" (1 Cor. 12:3). Man's goal is to find the Father, but God the Father is made known only through His Son. "No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him" (Matt. 11:27). Only the Father and the Son know each other. "Call no man your Father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in Heaven" (Matt. 23:9) and Heaven is "within you" (Luke 17:21).

And David said: "I will tell of the decree of the Lord; He said to me, 'You are My son, today I have begotten you'" (Ps. 2:7). David's divine sonship is unique, the only one of its kind and wholly supernatural. He was "born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God" (John 1:13).

The Father will be found by man only in a first person singular, present tense experience when David in the Spirit calls him Father, that is, my Lord. Jesus asked them a question, saying, "What do you think of the Christ? Whose Son is He?" They said to him, "The son of David." He said to them, "How is it then that David, in the Spirit, calls Him Lord… If David thus calls Him Lord, how is He his Son?" (Matt. 22:41-45).

In Hebrew thought, history consists of all the generations of men and their experiences fused into one great whole and this concentrated time, into which all the generations are fused, and from which they spring, is called "Eternity." Scripture states that: "God has put eternity into man's mind, yet so that man cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end" (Ecc. 3:11). The Hebrew word for "eternity" means also "youth, stripling, young man."

Saul saw David and said to Abner "Whose son is this youth... Inquire Whose son the stripling is?" Then turning to David he said: "Whose son are you, young man?" And David answered "I am the son of your servant Jesse the Bethemite" (1 Sam. 17:55-58). Whose son…? Note in all the passages (1 Sam. 17:55,56,58; Matt. 22:42), the inquiry is not about the son, but about his Father. The Father made known by David is the eternally true Father.

It is in us as persons that God the Father is revealed. David said "I am the son of Jesse." Jesse is any form of the verb to be. David's answer was "I am the son of Him Whose Name is 'I AM.' I am the son of the Lord."

One of the names for God is the name He gave to Moses. "Say to the people of Israel 'I AM has sent me to you'" (Exod. 3:14). He is the Eternal "I AM." God's first revelation of Himself is as "God Almighty" (Exod. 6:3). His second self-revelation is as "The Eternal I AM" (Exod. 3:14). His final revelation of Himself is as "the Father" (John 17). Only the Son can reveal God as Father. "No one (i.e. no human eye) has ever seen God; the only begotten Son, Who is in the bosom of the Father, He has made Him known" (John 1:18).

It is God Himself, the Eternal I AM, and His only begotten Son, the eternal youth David, who entered man's mind. At the end of his journey through the fires of affliction in this Age of Eternal death, man will find David and exclaim "I have found David... He shall cry to Me, Thou art my Father, my God, and the Rock of my salvation" (Ps. 89:20,26).

I do not reveal myself to myself directly as God or as Jesus Christ, but by implication parallel with Scripture, when David in the Spirit calls me Father. And this wisdom from within is without uncertainty.

"When it pleased God to reveal His Son in me, I did not confer with flesh and blood" (Gal. 1:15-16). The man in whom the Son of God appears finds it difficult to convince others of the reality of the revelation, because these supernatural experiences of Scripture take place in a realm of action too remote from our common experience. The whole drama belongs to a world far more real and vital than that which the intellect inhabits for the historic imagination to understand it.

    "Oh could I tell ye surely would believe it!
    Oh could I only say what I have seen!
    How should I tell or how can ye receive it,
    How, till he bringeth you where I have been?"
                                               — F. W. H. Myers

This entrance into the Father-Son relationship is truly by the Grace of God. "For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son" (John 3:16). It was the eternal plan of God to give Himself to man. And it is the Son, calling Him Father, who makes Him sure that He really is the Father.

When David in the Spirit calls him Father, he does not lose his distinctive individuality or cease to be the self he was before, but that self now includes a far greater self, which is none other than Jesus Christ whom David in the Spirit called "Lord." Man is heir to a Promise and to a Presence! "Abraham having patiently endured, obtained the promise" (Heb. 6:15). Grace is the final expression of God's love in action which man will experience when the Son is revealed in him, and who in turn reveals man as the Father.

The authority which underlies the story of Jesus Christ is a two-fold witness; the inward testimony of the Father, and the external testimony of Scripture. God Himself came, and comes, into human history in the person of the incarnate Jesus within us. This will be confirmed by the "signs," which will be experienced by man as foretold in Scripture.

"The Father Who dwells in Me does His works. Believe that I am in the Father and the Father in Me; or else believe for the sake of the works themselves. Truly, truly, I say to you, who believes in Me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I go to the Father" (John 14:10-12). "I came from the Father and have come into world; again, I am leaving the world and going to the Father" (John 16:28). "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30).

The Vision of God is granted to those who have had the revelation of the Father in the life of the incarnate Jesus in them, when the only begotten Son David calls them Father.

Only as the "signs" become our experience is God's purpose – and therefore the Scripture's purpose – fulfilled in us. "Scripture must be fulfilled in Me... for what is written about Me has its fulfillment" (Luke 22:37).

God gave Himself to all of us, to each of us. And it is His only begotten Son David, in the Spirit, calling us Father, who makes us sure that it is really so. "So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed" (John 8:36). "And as David returned from the slaughter of the Philistine... with the head of the Philistine in his hand, Saul said to him, 'Whose son are you, young man?'" (1 Sam. 17:57,58) for he did not know David's father, whom he had promised (I Sam. 17:25) to make free in Israel. The king had promised to make free the father of the man who destroyed the enemy of Israel.

We must not ignore the very personal and supernatural character of God's plan of salvation. The fulfillment of the plan takes place in man; it is inaugurated by the event called "His resurrection from the dead" [Acts 26:23; Romans 1:4 etc.]. "We have been born anew... through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead" (1 Peter 1:3). It is Christ in you —your I AM who is resurrected. The resurrection marks the beginning of the freeing of Jesus Christ the Father from the body of sin and death, and His return to His divine body of Love, the human form divine. This was the Lord's purpose from the beginning "which He set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time" (Eph. 1:9,10). "The Lord of hosts has sworn: As I have planned, so shall it be, and as I have purposed, so shall it stand" (Isa. 14:24).

Live and act on the assurance that God has brought His plan to fulfillment and continues to do so. God Himself came, and comes, into human history in the person of Jesus Christ in you, in me, in all. God awoke in the anonymous authors of the gospels, and continues to awake in individual man. Believe their testimony; do not seek new ways of access to a goal already attained.

Perhaps the best description of the unknown writers of the gospel of God is given in the words: "That which... we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life... That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you" (1 John 1:1-3). Faith is not complete till it has become experience. It is essential that those whose eyes have seen and whose hands have handled the Word of life, be sent and be conscious of themselves as sent, to declare it to the world.

It is the resurrected Christ, the twice-born man, who says: "Take My yoke upon you, and learn from Me... and you will find rest for your souls" (Matt. 11:29). He offers His knowledge of Scripture based on His own experience, for that of others based on speculation. Accept His offer. And it will keep you from losing your way among the tangled speculations that pass for religious truth. And show you the only way to the Father.

The man who is sent to preach the gospel of God is first called, and taken in Spirit into the divine assembly where the gods hold judgment. "God has taken His place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods He holds judgment" (Ps. 82:1).

The Hebrew word Elohim is plural, a compound unity, one made up of others. In this sentence it is translated as God and gods. The man who is called is brought before the Elohim, the risen Christ. He is asked to name the greatest thing in the world; he answers in the words of Paul, "faith, hope, and love, these three; but the greatest of these is love" (1 Cor. 13:13). At that moment, God embraces him, and they fuse and become One. For "he who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with Him" (1 Cor. 6:17). "So they are no longer two, but one. What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder" (Matt. 19:6). Men are called one by one to unite into a single Man, who is God. "The Lord will thresh out the grain, and you will be gathered one by one, O people of Israel" (Isa. 27:12). This union with the risen Christ is baptism with the Holy Spirit. From his baptism with the Holy Spirit to his resurrection, fall the "days of the Messiah" [Babylonian Talmud: Sanhedrin 98], a period of thirty years. During this period, he is so overwhelmingly in love with his mission, as messenger and preacher of the Gospel of God, a gospel which has laid such constraint upon him that he can do no other, feels that "if I preach the gospel, that gives me no ground for boasting. For necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!" (1 Cor. 9:16). A divine compulsion drives him as it had Jeremiah, who said, "If I say, 'I will not mention Him, or speak any more in His name,' there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot'" (Jer. 20:9).

The end of this thirty year period arrives with such dramatic suddenness that he has no time to observe its coming. "Jesus, when He began His ministry, was about thirty years of age" (Luke 3:23). Now the story of Jesus Christ unfolds in him in a series of the most personal, first person singular, present tense experiences. The entire series of events takes three and a half years. It begins with his resurrection and birth from above.

    "The dead heard the voice of the child
    And began to awake from sleep:
    All things heard the voice of the child
    And began to awake to life."
                                       — William Blake

While sleeping on his bed and dreaming of the redeemed society of a city "full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof" (Zech. 8:5), an intense vibration centered at the base of his skull awakens him, "Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light" (Eph. 5:14). As he wakes, he finds that he is not in the room where he fell asleep, but in his own skull (Golgotha). His skull is a completely sealed tomb. He does not know how he got there, but his one consuming desire is to get out. He pushes the base of his skull, and something rolls away leaving a small opening. He pushes his head through the opening and squeezes himself out inch by inch in the same manner that a child is born from his mother's womb. He looks at his body out of which he has just emerged. It is pale of face lying on its back and tossing its head from side to side like one in recovery from a great ordeal. "You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy. When a woman is in travail she has sorrow, because her hour has come; but when she is delivered of the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world" (John 16:20,21).

    "For there the Babe is born in joy
    That was begotten in dire woe;
    Just as we Reap in joy the fruit
    Which we in bitter tears did sow."
                             — William Blake

"You must be born from above" (John 3:7). "The Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother" (Gal. 4:26). The skull that was his tomb became the womb from which he is born anew. The vibration within his skull which roused him from sleep, appears now to be coming from without, it sounds like a great wind. He turns his head in the direction where the wind appears to be. Looking back to where his body was, he is surprised to find that it is gone but in its place sit three men.

This experience that faces him will be the fulfillment of the promise made to Abraham. "And the Lord appeared to him… He lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, three men stood in front of him... They said to him, 'Where is Sarah, your wife?' And he said, 'She is in the tent.' He said, 'I will surely return to you according to the time of life; and Sarah your wife shall have a son'...Abraham called the name of his son who was born to him... Isaac" ("he laughs"), (Gen. 18:1,2,9,10; 21:3). The three men suddenly appeared, they had not been seen approaching. Abraham does not at once realize the significance of this. They are ordinary men who have chanced to come his way. They too are disturbed by the wind. The youngest of the three is the most disturbed and goes over to investigate the source of the disturbance. His attention is attracted by a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths lying on the floor. He takes the babe in his arms and proclaiming it to be the resurrected man's babe, lays it on the bed. The man then lifts the babe in his arms and says: "How is my sweetheart?" The child smiles and the first act comes to an end. "And in that region there were shepherds out in the field... And an angel of the Lord appeared to them... And the angel said to them, 'Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, Who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger'" (Luke 2:8-12). God is born, for God is called Savior (Isa. 43:3, 45:15, Luke 1:47).

After the revelation, man searches the ancient scriptures for intimations and foreshadowings of his supernatural experience, and finding them there, knows that:

    "All was foretold me: naught
     Could I foresee:
    But I learned how the wind would sound
     After these things should be."
                                      – Edward Thomas

The unpredictable nature of the wind's course illustrates the spontaneity of the divine birth all the more easily since both in Greek and in Hebrew the word is used both for wind and spirit.

The plan of the Lord is described in the ancient scripture, but it cannot really be known until after it has been experienced by the individual. God has spoken, and what He has foretold is written there for all to understand. But His prophecy appears in a quite different light in prospect from what it is seen to be in retrospect. Everyone will know that Jesus Christ is the Father in the light of his own experience of the Christian Mystery.

"In these last days He has spoken to us by His Son" (Hebrews 1:2). Five months after man is resurrected and born from above, a vibration similar to that which began the first a c t starts in his head. This time it is centered at the top of his head. It increases in intensity until it explodes. After the explosion he finds himself seated in a modestly furnished room. Leaning against the side of an open door, and looking out on a pastoral scene, is his son David of Biblical fame. He is a youth in his early teens. David addresses him as "My Father." The resurrected man knows that he is David's Father, and David knows that he is his Son. Two men look at David lustfully and the Father reminds them of his Son's victory over the giant Philistine. And while he is sitting there and contemplating the unearthly beauty of his Son, the second act comes to its end. God the Father gave Himself to man that man might become God the Father. "I will tell of the decree of the Lord: He said to me, 'You are My Son, today I have begotten You'" (Ps. 2:7).

The third act unfolds four months after the Father-Son relationship has been revealed. It is dramatic from beginning to end. A bolt of lightning splits the body of the resurrected man from the top of his skull to the base of his spine. Now the new and living way is opened for him through the curtain, that is, through his body. Revelation is always in personal terms, and the human agents of God's revelation are never suppressed to the level of the impersonal. "Consequently, when He came into the world, He said, 'Sacrifices and offerings Thou has not desired, but a body hast Thou prepared for Me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings Thou hast taken no pleasure'. Then I said 'Lo, I have come to do Thy will, O God, as it is written of Me in the roll of the book'" (Heb. 10:5-7; Ps. 40:6-8 is quoted). God's will is done. God must save and God alone. At the base of his spine, he sees a pool of golden liquid light and knows that it is himself. He now has "confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way which He opened for us through the curtain, that is, through His flesh" (Heb. 10:19,20). As he contemplates the pool of golden liquid light, the blood of God, the living water, he fuses with it, and knows that it is himself, his divine Creator and Redeemer. Now like a bolt of spiral lightning, he ascends his spine entering the heavenly sanctuary of his skull violently. His head reverberates like thunder. "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up" (John 3:14). "From the days of John the Baptist until now the Kingdom of Heaven has been coming violently, and men of violence take it by force" (Matt. 11:12). To such men the new age has come.

Two years and nine months later, fulfilling the three and a half years of the ministry of Jesus, the fourth and final act of the drama of salvation comes to its climax. "And the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form, as a dove, and a voice came from heaven, "Thou art My beloved Son; with Thee I am well pleased" (Luke 3:22).

The head of the resurrected one suddenly becomes translucent. Hovering above him, as though floating, a dove with its eyes focused lovingly upon him, descends upon his outstretched hand, he draws her to his face, and the dove smothers him with love, kissing his face, his head and his neck. A woman, daughter of the voice of God says to him: "He loves you" and the drama of salvation comes to its end in him. He is now a son of God, a son of the resurrection. He "cannot die any more, because He is a Son of God, being a Son of Resurrection" (Luke 20:36). "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30). "I am the root and the offspring of David" (Rev. 22:16). He is the Father of humanity and its offspring. By becoming man, the limit of contraction and opacity, he breaks the shell, and expanding into translucence achieves his purpose. He has found "Him of Whom Moses in the law and the prophets wrote" (John 1:45).

The anonymous authors of the gospel of God are twice-born men, sons of God, sons of the Resurrection, who can die no more, having escaped from the body of sin and death. The gospel is the story of God's plan of salvation.

It will be helpful to all readers of the Word of God, to end this confession of faith with a quote from William Blake.

    "It ought to be understood that the
    Persons, Moses and Abraham, are not
    here meant, but the States Signified
    by those Names, the Individuals
    being representatives or Visions of
    those States as they were reveal'd
    to Mortal Man in the Series of
    Divine Revelations as they are written
    in the Bible: these various States
    I have seen in my Imagination; when
    distant they appear as One Man, but
    as you approach they appear Multitudes
    of Nations."

There is no secular history in the Bible. The Bible is the history of salvation and is wholly supernatural.