 |
|
|
 God's Word the Day before Yesterday,
Yesterday and Today -
Truth or Not?
God's Word the Day before Yesterday,
Yesterday and Today -
Truth or Not?
God Rehabilitates Moses Through
Further Prophets.
2000 years have passed since Jesus of Nazareth. The Son of God came to us as a human being, as the Son of Man, to bring us the message of God, His Father, who is also our Father. The message that Jesus brought us from God, His and our Father, is love.
The path to love begins with the reconciliation among people and between people and animals and Earth. This is the only path for man to find unity with God and His entire creation, including the All, the cosmos.
God is the love. And so, His infinite being is love. Jesus spoke to the people that His Father and He, Jesus, the Christ, are one. Jesus wanted to tell the people that His words are the truth which comes from heaven, from God, His Father, who is also the Father of all people. Jesus did not distance Himself from the people, instead regarding them as equals, sons and daughters of God. He said: You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Mt. 5:48). And He gave us the prayer which begins with the address: Our Father, who art in heaven … or, Our Father in Heaven …
Jesus gave us, among others, the following important pointer, which is also handed down in the Bible: Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. (Mt. 5:17-19)
In these words, Jesus spoke of the eternal law, and therefore of the eternal, unchangeable God. He unequivocally expressed that the prophets sent by God spoke truly, that in the prophetic word they proclaimed the truth that is God.
Comparing the Books of Moses in the Old Testament with the teachings of Jesus very quickly raises the question: Did Jesus speak the truth – also when He said that He would fulfill the words of the prophets? Or is the truth found in what can be read in the “Books of Moses?” And what about the prophets who came after Moses? Their statements differ in content in many instances from the words of Moses handed down to us; at times they contradict them. Or, do several different gods speak through the prophets of the Old Testament? And Jesus taught us about another God, different from the “God” who, for instance, spoke through “Moses.”
Anyone who thinks that the “Christian” churches have a convincing answer and that they can help him overcome confusion and uncertainty in order to reach clarity and sureness will be disappointed: The churches essentially explain that every word in the Bible is the truth of God. This means that God’s words through Moses are recorded authentically in the Bible. According to this reasoning, “God” commanded us, among other things, to kill animals in bloody, cruel sacrificial offerings and to present them to Him. Certain people, the priests, were supposedly selected by Him, the Lord, to perform the sacrifices in minutely prescribed rituals, “as Moses was commanded by the Lord.”
If we were following church teachings, this would be the truth.
But what about the other Old Testament prophets – Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and many others – through whom God spoke against burnt offerings, sacrifices, and the like? Jesus, the greatest prophet of all times, also spoke against the statements and instructions that God supposedly gave through the prophet Moses.
The contradictions in these different “statements of God” are clearly apparent. But church teaching still insists that both are the truth? Let us take a look at the different images of God:
Jesus taught us about the God of the Ten Commandments, who is a kind, wise God, a God of love and reconciliation, a Creator who is for the life of animals, yes, for all of nature.
The “God” of the Books of Moses by comparison is a hard, cruel and brutal God, who inflicts heavy punishment upon people, even punishment by death, above all who sees to it that the animals are tortured and butchered in bestial ways, in order to then be appeased by the smoke rising from the burnt offerings. Did the “God” of the “Books of Moses” in the Old Testament with His instructions on cruel practices ignore the God of the Ten Commandments?
Time and again the question is put to us: Is the God of the Old Testament – above all the God of the “Books of Moses”– another God than the God of the New Testament? If it is indeed one and the same God then either the Old Testament – particularly the “Books of Moses” – must have been falsified, or Jesus did not speak the truth. Or is God perhaps changeable?
Issue No. 13 of The Prophet (April 1998), a dialogue between the prophet and experts on Catholic and Protestant theology, has already explored this question. But the question is raised again here with a particular view to animal sacrifices.
The first Original Christians were not burdened by such questions. To them it was clear that the word, the teachings, the message and life of God’s Son, Jesus, the Christ, is the authentic word of God and the authentic will of God for people and souls and therefore, the measure for all that had been and would be presented as God’s word at other times and other places.
Today, we would have no reason to ponder the question “God’s word yesterday and today – truth or not?” – in fact, there would be no need for God to send another teaching prophet to Earth – if, yes, if, original Christianity had been able to sustain its orientation toward Jesus, the Christ. But it was not able to sustain this orientation for long and the result is that the demon in what has been attributed to Moses, although corrected by Jesus in many respects, is still effective today in a deeper and more “global” way than many realize. But, what a person is not aware of can influence and control him.
God is love, kindness and gentleness. He does not need to be placated by cruel pagan customs.
But how then did it come to the false statements and instructions in the Books of Moses? Who had an interest in falsely attributing to Moses, for example, the orders for bloodthirsty pagan practices? God Himself gives the answer; much later He spoke through the prophet Jeremiah:
For in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, I did not speak to your fathers or command them concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices. But this command I gave them, ‘Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people: and walk in all the way that I command you, that it may be well with you.’
But they did not obey or incline their ear, but walked in their own counsels and the stubbornness of their evil hearts, and went backward and not forward.
From the day that your fathers came out of the land of Egypt to this day, I have persistently sent all my servants the prophets to them, day after day; yet they did not listen to me, or incline their ear, but stiffened their neck. They did worse than their fathers.
So you shall speak all these words to them, but they will not listen to you. You shall call to them, but they will not answer you. And you shall say to them, ‘This is the nation that did not obey the voice of the Lord, their God, and did not accept discipline; truth has perished; it is cut off from their lips ...’ (Jer. 7:22-28)
Thus, through Jeremiah, God exposed the falsification of the “Books of Moses” and with this, the prophet Moses was rehabilitated.
Moses is also being rehabilitated in our time, on the one hand by modern Biblical research, which has proven that God’s word through the mouth of Moses is not authentic as read in the Old Testament, and that instead, the text was much more deliberately altered and “edited”; the researchers agree in attributing to the priests large parts of the Bible’s handed-down “final version.”
But that is not the only point that speaks in favor of Moses. The highest “authority,” the primordial intelligence, all-wisdom and justice, the Spirit of the Christ of God through His prophetess of this time, gives clear testimony in Moses’ favor in the great work of revelation: “This Is My Word. Alpha and Omega. The Gospel of Jesus, The Christ-Revelation which the world does not know.” Among other things, the following is written there:
Moses neither ordered nor condoned the sacrifice of animals. However, he did not interfere in the satanic will of those who wanted to eat meat. He taught and instructed them that the consumption as well as the sacrificing of animals is sin. But since the stubborn Israelites insisted on doing it, Moses had to be silent; for the Israelites, too, were children of God and had their free will. They saw everything only through their sin and for this reason, considered the silence of Moses as approval. (p. 581)
The Spirit of God confirms several times in His mighty revelation that Moses was a faithful servant of God who faithfully gave the word of God to the people of his time. God thus again rehabilitates Moses.
Those who read God’s words in Jeremiah with the heart will be convinced that the “Books of Moses” must be the books of the caste of priests at that time, who ascribed their ideas, their cruel, murderous, pagan cults to the teachings of the prophet Moses. Apparently, the priests wanted to continue to practice what was common to the pagan religions of that time and what the Israelites had brought with them from earlier times before their enslavement in Egypt.
to the next chapter
|
|
