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The First Commandment

In the Bible that we have before us, which is the translation by Martin Luther*, the first commandment reads: “I Am the Lord, your God. You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make for yourself a graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is on the earth below, or that is in the water under the earth

What does this first commandment want to tell the Original Christians in Universal Life? How do the Original Christians keep this first commandment? How do we actualize it in our daily life?

The first statement at the beginning of the first commandment is: “I Am the Lord, your God.” This statement is of fundamental importance for the Original Christians, because God is everything that is; He is the Spirit of life and the Father of us all. The “be all and end all” of man is rooted in this.

The first commandment continues: “You shall have no other gods before Me”. Under “other gods”, the Original Christians understand not only power, money, highly developed technology, craving for pleasure, drugs and the like. We see it this way:

Everything that is not in accordance with the divine law, with the eternal word of God, is “other gods”, that is, idols. Our exaggerated wishes, passions and cravings are a part of this, everything that people strive for beyond a reasonable limit.

If we nurse these compelling, extreme wishes, cravings, passions and addictions – by moving them around in our feelings, sensations and thoughts for a long time, or even by doing them – then we worship these idols, so to speak, and pay tribute to them. The “other gods” can also be the people we place on a pedestal, whom we honour instead of simply respecting them as our neighbour.

The first commandment continues: “You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth below, or that is in the water under the earth.” What do the Original Christians do here?

We know that the Spirit of God dwells in every person. In order to turn to God, our Father, and to Christ, our Redeemer, we don’t need any outer images, before which we kneel down and worship, but we go into our inner being and pray to God there. We don’t need any statues or shrines, any pictures of the crucified One, or any other things, because we know that the Spirit of God is alive in us. We turn to Him. He is our support and hold.

Every picture of a saint that is honoured is ultimately “the other god”, because every figure that is honoured in an external way draws us away from the real God, from God in our innermost being.

Christ revealed to us in the following sense: When we honour pictures or statues – like, for example, the many pictures of saints – then we are making ourselves a picture of God or of the angels or even of heaven which is often shown as something shining and radiant, but is presented entirely according to earthly conditions. This picture is then engraved in our soul. When the hour of death comes and we go into the spheres beyond as a soul, we may have to suffer from these pictures, because they are programmes that we entered into our soul.

With our thoughts, we cannot imagine the eternal heavens. We can’t make a picture of the pure spiritual worlds, nor of angels, the spirit beings, and certainly not of God-Father, the Father-Mother-God, nor of Christ, the Co-Regent of the heavens. Images and statues are therefore just ideas. And when we go into the beyond as souls with such ideas, we will have to first discard them, until in the course of the purification process our soul comes to the true picture, to the reality of the Being, until we immerse into the heavens which we as people cannot imagine, until we behold God, our Father, face to face, and Christ, our brother and Redeemer, and all of our brothers and sisters who are divine beings in heaven. This is what Christ, the revealing Spirit, is teaching us.

The Original Christians in Universal Life don’t have a body on the cross either. For us, Christ is risen. We are aware that we bear the Lord’s deed of redemption in our souls, in our hearts. It is symbolized by the free cross. For us, the cross of resurrection is, at the same time, the sign that points the way into the eternal Being.

The body is presented in different ways. But if we believe that the body, the image, was once Jesus, then we have this body as an image in our soul. When we go into the beyond as a soul after our physical death, the image, the body, will appear. And we will then have a very hard time removing from our soul this image that we have worshipped again and again. It can then be a long way until we become aware that the risen One is a radiant being of the eternal Being and not a body on a cross.

In the first commandment, it also says that we should not make any images of what is on the earth below, or that is in the water under the earth. We can understand this when we know that everything that we see on the earth is not the true reality. Our physical eyes look at the shell that bears the life, the Spirit, within.

The animals, the plants, the stones, everything that is on and in the earth, what we see in the water and what is on the bottom of the oceans are aspects of God, which – because of the condensation of matter – have taken on another form than what they have in the eternal Being. We should perceive our second neighbour, the animal, in our heart; we should affirm and carry in our heart all of nature as the great creation light of God. However, it would be wrong to assume that the earthly form of life – for instance, the appearance of a flower or an animal – corresponds to the creation power of God in heaven. In  the flower,  in the animal, is the essence of life, is God – the external form is the material shell.

The nature kingdoms are aspects of God that have taken on form. And so, what we see here on earth is not the original creation, but only a pale reflection of how God created it in the pure creation. This is why we should not make any images of it and think that this form is the same in heaven.

In the Bible “The Good News”*, the first commandment is somewhat different: “I Am the Lord, your God. There are no other gods for you beside Me. Make no images of God for yourself. Make for yourself no likeness of anything in heaven, on the earth or in the ocean.”

And so, it isn’t the letter that is the truth, but the meaning. This is why it is important for us as Original Christians to grasp the meaning, through the daily fulfilment of the commandments and the Sermon on the Mount.

* Luther Bible: The Bible according to the translation of Martin Luther; text is the revised edition of 1984. The English version used here has been translated from the German in the original text. This is so for all the Bible quotes used in this book.

* “The Good News” Bible text: Bible in modern German. Stuttgart 1982. Bible translation in German commissioned by and in the responsibility of the Catholic and Protestant Churches of the Germany-speaking countries.

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