ARTICLES: BIBLE
The Ten Commandments of GodTHOU SHALT NOT TAKE THE NAME OF THE LORD THY GOD IN VAIN!The Second Commandment It is the Name that awakens and brings into focus the concept in man! Whoever dishonors a name and dares to debase it thereby debases the concept! Bear this in mind at all times! This clear Commandment of the Lord, however, is the least observed of all the Ten Commandments, thus the most transgressed. This non-observance takes a thousand different forms. Even though man thinks that many of these transgressions are quite harmless, just superficial expressions, nevertheless it remains a transgression of this explicitly given Commandment! Just these thousand-fold forms of allegedly just harmless non-observance degrade the Holy Name of God, and with it the concept of God which is always closely associated with the Name, robbing It of Its Holiness before men, and indeed even before children, defiling Its sanctity by making It commonplace, by dragging It down into general phraseology! Men do not shrink from venturing into the ridiculous with this. Not one of the many expressions will I cite; for the Name is far too high and sublime for that! But anybody need only observe this for even one day, and he will probably be aghast at the enormous accumulation of transgressions of the Second Commandment by human beings of both sexes, among old and young, right down to children who are hardly able to form a proper sentence yet. For “the youngsters twitter as they hear the old ones sing”! For this reason, it is often just this debasing of God which is one of the first things that young people learn through the only apparently so harmless transgressions against God’s Laws! The effect, however, is the worst of all the transgressions! It has spread abroad in an absolutely devastating way among all mankind, not only with Christians, but also among Muslims, among Jews and Buddhists; the same can be heard ad nauseam everywhere! What value, then, can the Name “God” still hold for man! It is debased, is respected not even as much as the smallest coin! Much worse than a worn out garment. And this man of the earth, otherwise so would-be-clever, regards it as harmless, and sins in this more than a hundred times a day! Where is there any reflection! Where the least stirring of the intuitive perception! You, too, have become completely deadened to it, and listen calmly when the most sacred of all concepts is thus trampled into the dirt of everyday life! But do not be deceived! The debt ledger in the beyond is therewith mercilessly charged for everyone who has sinned in this respect! And just this is not so easy to expiate because it is attended by such far reaching ill consequences, which must avenge themselves unto the third and fourth generation, unless one day there is some person in this chain of descendants who recognizes this evil practice and calls a halt to it. Therefore try to combat the harmful habit in the circle of your acquaintances. But above all first sever your own threads of karma with all the energy you still possess, so that your debt ledger will not become greater than it already is in this respect. Do not believe that atonement will be easy because hitherto you intended no evil at all with this! The harm is none the less exactly the same! And the sin against the Commandment remains absolutely unchanged! You knew the Commandment perfectly well. If you did not really strive to become clear about its significance, then that is your fault! Nothing can therefore be written off for you on that account! Listen and act, so that you become capable of redeeming much while still on earth. Otherwise the morass which awaits you when you enter the beyond, and which places itself obstructively in the path of ascent, will be terrifying. Yet not only the individual human being, but also the authorities have shown their opposition to this Commandment and also to the Word of God for centuries, in that they forcibly demanded of human beings the taking of oaths, compelling them to commit the transgression with the threat of severe earthly punishment if they did not comply with the demand. But the punishment in the beyond is far more severe, and it falls upon all those who exacted the oath, not upon those who had to take it under pressure. Christ as well reiterated explicitly when He said: “Let your communication be yea or nay; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil!” And indeed the authorities had the power to give the decisive weight to the words Yes or No by punishing a deception before court in the same way as perjury! In this way they were able to raise the value of the words before court to that level which they needed to pass judgment. It was not necessary to lead people by force to the transgression of God’s Commandment for that reason! Now they shall receive their sentence in the beyond. More severe, and stricter than they had ever assumed as they mocked reciprocal action. There is no escaping this! But the churches and their representatives carried it even further; with invocations to God, they subjected their fellow-men to the most terrible tortures, and finally again with invocations to God they burned them if they had not already succumbed to their torments beforehand. The Roman Emperor Nero, well known to all and notorious for his cruelty, was not so bad, not so damnable in his tortures of the Christians as was the catholic church with its enormous record of sins in regard to the Laws of God! First, he did not murder and torture nearly so much, and second, not with such hypocritical invocations to God. Invocations of this kind must be numbered among the greatest blasphemies which it is possible for a person to perpetrate! It avails them nothing if these same churches today condemn what in those days had unfortunately been perpetrated through them for all too long; for they did not voluntarily abandon it! And even today there is not much difference in the mutual hostility, only in a more restrained, more modern form! In this, too, only the form has changed in the course of time, not the living core! And this core alone, which one so likes to conceal, counts before the Judgment of God, never the outward form! And this present, only apparently harmless form was born out of the same unspeakable spiritual arrogance of the representatives of all the churches, as hitherto. And where this damnable arrogance is not present, there is to be found an empty conceit based on the earthly power of the churches. Often enough these vices result in the most unseemly hostilities, interwoven in addition with earthly calculations towards extending influence, if not even towards a yearning for great political importance. And all this with the Name of “God” on their lips, so that I want to call out again as did the Son of God: “By your deeds you have marked my Father’s houses as dens of murderers, by considering them to be in your honor! You call yourselves servants of God’s Word, but you have become servants of your own arrogance!” Every Catholic thinks himself far better before God than a Protestant, without there being any cause for it, but every Protestant thinks himself more enlightened, more advanced, and thus nearer to his God than the Catholic! And these are all those who claim to be followers of Christ, to form themselves according to His Word. Both parties are fools, who rely on something that does not count in the least before the Will of God! Just all these sin far more against the Second Commandment of God than adherents of other religions; for they abuse the Name of God not only with words but through the deed, with their whole manner of living, even in their so-called worship service. To every thinking and closely observing person they give only a horrible example of meaningless forms and empty thought. Just in the boundless conceit of wishing to make themselves and those around them believe that they already possess a place in Heaven ahead of those of other faiths, they desecrate the concept of God most deeply! It is not the outward form of church rites, baptism and so much else that matters! The inner man alone has to stand before the Judgment! Remember this, you haughty ones, to whom it has already been announced that on the Day of Judgment, puffed-up, they will proudly set forth with banners and gorgeous raiment to receive their reward joyously. Yet they will never reach the Realm of the Spirit at the foot of God’s Throne, because they will receive the reward they deserve before they get there. An icy blast will sweep them away like worthless chaff; for they lack pure humility within themselves, and true love for their neighbor! By their nature they are the worst abusers of the Name of “God”, the most flagrant transgressors of the Second Commandment! They all served Lucifer, not God! And thus they scorn all the Commandments of God! From the first to the last! But mainly the Second, the transgression of which in this manner represents the blackest defilement of the concept of God in the Name! Beware of continuing to pass over this Commandment lightly! From now on, watch yourselves and your surroundings keenly! Reflect that if you faithfully keep nine of the Commandments and disregard one of them, you will still be lost in the end! When a Commandment is given by God, that is already proof that it must not be taken lightly, that it is absolutely imperative that it be fulfilled! Otherwise it would never have been given to you. Do not dare to pray if you are unable to vibrate with your whole soul in the words, and beware lest you reveal yourselves as thoughtless prattlers before your God; for thereby you would be guilty before Him of misuse of the Name of God. Before you ask Him for something, consider carefully whether it is needed urgently! Do not become entangled in formal prayers to be rattled off at certain times, as has become the bad habit in all religious practices. This is not only misuse of God’s Name but blasphemy! In joy or need, an ardent intuitive perceiving without words remains far more valuable than a thousand spoken prayers, even if this intuitive perceiving lasts only a fraction of a second. For such intuitive perceiving is then always genuine, and not hypocritical! And therefore it is never a misuse of the concept of God either. It is a sacred moment when the human spirit wishes to cast itself in supplication or gratitude before the Steps of God’s Throne! This must never become habitual chatter! Not by the servants of a church either! That man who is capable of using the Name of God on every possible and impossible occasion in daily life has never had the faintest idea of the concept of God! He is an animal, not a human being! Foras a human spirit he must possess the ability to perceive inwardly a divining of God, even though it be but once in his earth-life! But this once alone would suffice to deprive him of any desire to transgress the Second Commandment thoughtlessly! He will then eternally bear within himself the need to utter the Name “God” only on his knees and in the highest purity of his whole inner being! Whoever does not have this is far removed from even being worthy of God’s Word, much less of entering God’s Kingdom! Of enjoying His blissful proximity! For this reason it is also forbidden to make a picture of God the Father according to man’s concepts! Every attempt at this is bound to lead to nothing but a pitiful belittling, since neither the human spirit nor the human hand is enabled to see even the minutest part of the reality in visions, and to retain it in the earthly way in a picture! The greatest work of art in this matter could signify only deep degradation. A Single Eye, in Its unutterable radiance, suggests everything. – Thus exalted is the Greatness, inconceivable to you, which you embrace in the Word “God” and which with careless audacity you often dare to use as the most ordinary of empty and thoughtless expressions! You will have to render account of this conduct of yours! |