The correct order needed for the Foundation of Faith

The fall meant that the universal order as created by God was turned upside down. Lucifer the angel, who should have been object to Adam the child of God, became subject to Adam.

Always fall means that the original subject-object order is turned upside down, and restoration of faith means that the original subject-object order is restored.

Peace under God is good. Peace is good as long as there are maintained the original positions of subject and object. But if peace means that Adam is obedient to an angel, and that Adam does not revolt against the angel, then that peace is evil peace.

Harmony is good when God’s side is subject. But when you in heavenly position are accepting to be object to someone who takes a worldly position, then that harmony will lead to trouble.

Fall always means that the position of original object dominates the position of original subject. Faith always means that the position of original subject can maintain or regain the dominating position in relation to the original object.

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Let us try to understand what this means for an individual who is going the way of religion to restore his or her faith. An original person has a heart, mind and body relating to creation. The heart of the person relates to God.

If the mind dominates the heart, then fall takes place.

An example of this could be when someone wants to give a speech to pass on God’s principles. If you teach God’s Word from a heart united with God, then it is good to teach God’s Word. But if you teach God’s Word with your mind while your heart is not with God, then your teaching promotes fall.

Your heart is created to be subject to your mind. Any activities of your mind that are not under control of your heart centered on God, are evil. All activities of your mind under the control of your heart centered on God are good.

If you speak to other people, for example by giving a speech explaining God’s Word, and your heart is not with God, then your speaking can only be to take people away from God.

Only when your own heart is united in love with God you can speak words of truth in which God’s love is actually conveyed.

What does this mean in the life of practice for a teacher?

A teacher of God’s Word should never speak to people if he or she did not make an acceptable Foundation of Faith. Each person has to daily bring offerings to God. If you brought a good offering to God today, then on that foundation you can speak God’s Word in a truthful manner. But if you failed to bring a good offering to God today, then you should not speak to so-called pass on God’s Word to people. Because if you did not make an acceptable offering to God, then you were egoistic. Your heart is not with God, but with yourself. And then it is impossible for you to give a speech in which you pass on God’s love.

In God’s world, everything has to be whole and completed. Words should not be spoken if they are not coming from a loving heart. Actions should not be done if they don’t come from a truthful mind.

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Suppose that you want to do a task as given to you by a central figure under God. This task has to be done with your body. If your body is operating under a truthful mind, then the actions of your body will be acceptable to God. But if your body is operating under a mind that has feelings against God, then your offerings are not acceptable.

Cain brought an offering to God that he had prepared with his body. But God could not accept Cain’s offering, because Cain’s mind was not truthful and Cain’s heart was not desiring to give to God. Cain had feelings against God, even though Cain had prepared an offering.

If Cain had really only wanted to please God with his offering, then Cain would not have gotten angry when his offering could not be accepted. If Cain really had loved God, Cain would just have thought that he still wanted to give something to God, and he would have figured out how to change his offering in such a way that it would please God. But when God did not like Cain’s offering, Cain’s concerns were not for God, but they were against his brother Abel. Cain was just wanting to get blessings by making offerings to God, and when Cain thought that Abel would get the blessings that Cain wanted for himself, then Cain got jealous and angry at Abel and he murdered Abel.

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What is important in religious life is that we accept the positions as God created them. God made love to be higher than intellect and emotions. Good love should reign our thoughts and feelings. If your thoughts are so-called good and original and principled, but your heart is not united in real love with God, then your thoughts will not be acceptable to God.

In practical daily religious life, this means that we should always keep the good order as installed by God. We should only act from good thoughts and feelings, and we should think and feel only out of love for God.

How can we assure ourselves that we are acting from the right order?

It is possible to check ourselves by demanding that we make a Foundation of Faith before we make a Foundation of Substance. Or: bring an acceptable offering to God before you speak and act. In any situation of life, our relation to God has to be in order.

The standard that is demanded for us is really very high. If you have a good relation to God today, then based on that you could do all kind of things. That is the same as saying: before you can make a good Foundation of Substance you have to make a Foundation of Faith.

If your relation to God is not in order, you cannot really act in any good way. You cannot make offerings, you cannot speak God’s Word, you cannot go out to prepare financial offerings to God.

Before you can make a Foundation of Substance, you have to make a Foundation of Faith. That means that you have to make your relation to God in order first.

If your relation to God broke down, then what you have to do?

You cannot make offerings to God as long as your relation to God is not in order.

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There is one fundamental rule for life under God: You cannot deal with God as long as you are having love for and connections to evil. Before you can make a Foundation to receive the Messiah, you must have made a Foundation of Substance. Before you can make a Foundation of Substance, you must have made a Foundation of Faith. Before you can make a Foundation of Faith, you must separate yourself from evil.

The catchword for Foundation to receive the Messiah is: LOVE FOR YOUR NEIGHBOR

The catchword for Foundation of Substance is: PRACTICE OF TRUTH

The catchword for Foundation of Faith is: OFFERING TO GOD.

The catchword for separation from evil is: SEPARATION FROM EVIL.

Religious life is the life in which you each day practice the following four demands:

1. SEPARATION FROM EVIL

2. OFFERING TO GOD

3. PRACTICE OF TRUTH

4. LOVE FOR YOUR NEIGHBOR.

When you do really practice to live your life in this way, then you will surely grow. But if you try to offer to God without having separated from evil, you will be in trouble. If you try to practice the truth without having made your relation to God in order, you will be in trouble. If you try to love your neighbor without having practiced the truth, you will be in trouble.

God’s world is a world of exact order.

April 15, 2001

Faith and tests

Image via Wikipedia

Faith is the degree in which you have a good relation to God. The more you have grown in your religious life, the more you will have gained faith.
Faith is like a string, a wire or a piece of rope that binds you with God. The more difficult your mission is, the more complicated the situations are around you, the stronger has to be your connection to God. Through your faith you are bound to God. If you loose the connection to God, you are lost. It is like you would be a plant without roots, or an automobile without gas, or a house without foundations. If your faith breaks down, your relation to God breaks down, and then you are simply completely lost.
If you would go out with a boat on the wide ocean on a trip of several weeks, you are wise if you check whether your boat does function under most extreme conditions. You test your boat and all instruments on it before you dare to go on the ocean. In the same way, before God will allow you to do a new task, God will test your faith.
All the time in your religious life, your faith is being tested. How much do you love God when you come to stand without husband or wife? How much do you love God if you are without food? Does your love for God still hold if God asks you to give up your secure financial foundation? Do you go to God when your father or restoration parent treats you in a harsh way?
There are many tests of faith. If you come under a test of faith given to you by God, you will not know that it is a test. You find yourself in difficulties, and you don’t know why. But most important is how you respond to it. Do you go to God in faith and trust or do you resent God, that is the question.
To trust God or to not trust God, that is the question.
Maybe you feel that you love God and that you are giving everything to fulfill your mission, and then all of a sudden, there are said bad things about you in public. Do you go to God in that situation, or do you resent God and go away from God, that is the question.
Life of religion is a life of being tested.
Suppose that all of a sudden there is being told to you that you lost your mission. This actually always is a test of God. If you accept that you lost your mission, then you will really lose your mission, but if you know that your mission is given to you for all eternity, that your mission is stuck to you just as your own nose belongs to you, then you know that you cannot accept that your mission is taken away. Maybe you have to change your way of doing in order to fulfill your mission, but it cannot be that God would ever take away your mission.
All situations of daily life function as tests of faith in God. Unfortunately, many people do fail these tests of faith.
When Lucifer approached Eve, God saw this as a test of faith for Eve. It doesn't mean that God sent Lucifer to test Adam and Eve, but because God trusts God's children Adam and Eve, such a situation of temptation functions as a test of faith. Eve had to prove that she would obey The Commandment under these difficult circumstances. God did not intervene in this test. God hoped and expected that Eve would act right. When Eve did not act right and fell under Lucifer, God trusted that Eve would learn from her mistakes. When Eve did not really learn from her mistakes, God’s heart was broken, but all that God could conclude was that Eve had failed to pass the test of faith.
Once someone failed to pass a test of faith, God tries to lift the person up. Not always God is successful in this. But even though God’s heart was broken after the fall of Adam and Eve, and even though God did not manage to bring Adam and Eve back to God’s heart until the day of today, God could not ignore the outcome of the test of faith in which both Adam and Eve failed.

To have faith, this is man’s responsibility. God cannot intervene in this. God has to test us, because God must know if we are able to fulfill the mission that God wants to give us. If we fail the test, then we cannot fulfill the mission that God has given us. If we pass a test, then God can give us the mission for which we were created. God can safely let us enter a new stage without having to be worried that we are confronted with situations we could not handle.
To have faith, this is our personal, our own responsibility. To test us, this is what God has to do, because God has to know if we did fulfill our responsibility and if we are ready for the next stage or task of life.
Adam and Eve failed their test of faith, and God is still waiting for them to pass their test of faith and to reach individual perfection after they obeyed The Commandment. One day, both Adam and Eve will pass the tests of faith. God knows that this will happen, but God cannot force Adam or Eve or you or me to do what we don’t really want to do. God has to know if we are ready for new responsibilities, and therefore God is testing our faith. If we use God’s tests in the right way, then we learn from the outcome of God’s tests of ourselves. In that way, if we failed a test, we can find out what we did wrong, and then we can correct our mistakes and still qualify for the mission that God wants to give us. If we passed a test, then we can prepare ourselves for the following test.
To have faith, this is your responsibility, this is my responsibility. We must prove our faith in front of God and God can only know if we have faith by testing our faith. If we take these tests in the right way, knowing that through tests God wants to prepare us and help us, then we can advance in each situation in life, regardless whether we passed or failed a test of faith. Most important is that we keep trusting God, that we never think that God’s intentions were not so good.
The worst in life is when you failed a test and after it you begin to blame God for everything that happens to you. There always is a way back to God. God is always waiting for you to do what God expects you to do. Therefore, the very worst of all is if you give up your trust in God and begin to live a life without God, feeling frustrated about God and hating God and disliking God.

April 13, 2001

Your own contribution to your own resurrection

Image via WikipediaVision of Ezekiel

How can you or how can i contribute to your or my own resurrection?

Resurrection is resurrection of the spirit. That we speak about 're'-surrection is to stress the fact that the spirit is not in the state it should be in. When there would not be obstructive forces in the universe, everyone's spirit would just grow normally like a tree that is treated well and has access to all necessary nutrients.

Some people believe they can grow by just consuming a lot of spiritual food. They do acquire much knowledge in that way, but will that make them grow in a healthy manner? Compare it to eating good food. What when you eat food all the time but you don't move your body, don't work out etc.? You get fat and ugly and will have a short life span.

It's like that with spiritual food. If you only try to get more knowledge, your spirit will not get resurrected. You might even get addicted to what is the spiritual equivalent of junk food. You consume knowledge but in reality that knowledge doesn't steer you to live a healthy spiritual life and will kill you in the end.

The key word for having a healthy spiritual life is 'faith.' The faith meant here is not faith in a particular religion or spiritual teaching. Original faith is faith in your own good relation to the Creator, it is faith in love and goodness, it is faith in yourself as a good being.

To have this kind of good faith is our own responsibility. When you loose this faith, you are lost. When you forgot to be a good person and when you forgot that you have a relation to your Source the Creator, your spirit will go down and come in need for resurrection. We all are in need of resurrection because we were not born in a good world. We were born as the outcome of a history of troubles and it is our task to elevate ourselves above that.

Faith is something that must be built up. You can destroy your faith or you can build it up. To destroy good faith can be done with one or a few wrong actions. After you made a big mistake, your faith goes down in a falling movement. To build it up, you need to invest yourself over longer time doing the right things. Faith cannot be built up in an instant, but you could lose it very quickly.

The question then is how to build up good faith. There are a few elements to build up a foundation of faith. The first element is you. There is a central person who must build up faith. This means that your faith is dependent on what you do. You can inherit some kind of faith by uniting in love with other people who have already built a foundation of faith, but eventually, to make your faith grow, you have to do it yourself.

What do you have to do to build up faith? This is what you have to find out. There are no general rules for this. Faith is your living relation to the Creator, to your own and deepest good core. You can't build up faith as if it were a kind of diploma for that you have to pass pre-described tests. You build up faith in your own personal course. Your course is different from that of everyone else's. So, your first task is then to find out what you must do, what you must accomplish as next step in your life. This you can only find out by yourself, as an individual, in deep meditation or prayer.

Once you know what you should do, you have to do it, whatever it is that you must do. What you must do is called 'the offering.' You offer yourself by giving yourself, sacrificing from yourself to God and for others. So you get a task and when you accomplish this task, it is called an offering.

This offering must be fulfilled over a certain time period. There are also numbers connected to your offering. For example, an offering could be that you should fast for three days, to prepare yourself for a task that comes after your fasting. Another offering could be that you should offer some of your money for people starving from hunger. Your offering could be that you should study a certain holy book, over a certain number of days. What you have to do should not be determined by yourself, but you yourself are responsible to find out what you should do.

If you make up your own mind about all this, you will be unable to do it from your original heart and your offering will not be connected to God. There will not take place resurrection. It may appear to you that you advance, but you are not really progressing because you made your offerings while disconnected from the Creator.

The central elements for building up faith are:

1. You yourself as the central person who must do it in relation to the Creator
2. The offering that must be fulfilled
3. A certain amount of time
4. Specified numbers that must be fulfilled.

When you build up your foundation of faith, your spirit will gradually be resurrected. This process of resurrection is actually a process of recreation. Because recreation is essentially a creative process, time and numbers are involved, just like the original creation of everything takes time and numbers. For example, an unborn baby spends 40 weeks in the womb of the mother. A week means seven days. A day is defined by the circulation of the Earth around its axis.

August 8, 2006

What to do when our faith is failing...

Let's analyze the mechanism of failing faith so we can learn to restore it. There are principles for how to build up faith. There also can be discovered why personal faith in God goes down. When we lose divine inspiration we need to take some steps backwards and consider and contemplate.

Faith is built up by making a Foundation of Faith. This sounds like a kind of technical concept, to some even at the edge of meaningless, but there is much depth in it.

All foundations in the living cosmos grow through stages and the Foundation of Faith is no difference. When we build up a Foundation of Faith it can only be done by growing through the regular stages of growth, in this case related to our faith in God and God's love. By doing the right things over time, we can be certain that our faith will grow and that our inspiration for a good life will deepen and expand.

Faith grows over time. That is what is being said through the addition of the word 'foundation.' We build foundation upon foundation, we construct our building of faith upon the foundations laid earlier in our lives and also upon the foundations made by historical and current central figures for God.

To expand our own foundation of faith, always 'I' am the central figure of it. It is me who has to build my foundation of faith. I do this by obeying the will of God, over a certain time period. What we have done in obedience to God's will must be connected to God, must be offered to God, and always this offering incorporates a certain number that had to be fulfilled.

From this we can conclude that when our faith diminishes, when our inspiration to do God's will drops low, when we lost hope for a good future, it is because something in building our foundation of faith went wrong.

The fall of man came about because of attacks from the spiritual world, by evil angels. It is the work of evil angels, also working through people on earth and in spirit world, to destroy our faith. How are they doing this?

Many meaningful things could be said about this issue when it is approached from different viewpoints. Here i want to focus on two main methods that evil angels use to attempt to destroy our faith.

The first main method is that they try to make us unaware of the reality of God and the spiritual dimension of life. When this happens, we tend to become very physical and external. Evil angels who managed to get close to us and to control our lives from spirit world have methods to close our spiritual senses. Once our spiritual senses got closed we become more and more unaware of our eternal existence, of our future of happiness in the spiritual world and of God's ideal for us how to make the foundations of a life of eternal joy living in love with our family, ancestors and descendants.

In our lives of faith we must make a victory over such attacks by keeping to what we know is God's will for our lives and missions. This sometimes can be a great struggle, but it is a fight that absolutely must be won.

The second main method is that evil angels and spirits work to give us a false ideal. In many of such cases, people don't lose their spiritual abilities but they are dominated or controlled by the lies of those evil angels and spirits.

False spiritual ideals roughly can be categorized in three kinds. The first are the false ideals of those who know that they are evil and they also like it to be evil. This kind of thing can be found in for example churches that were set up by Satan and who openly profess the ideal of satanism.

The second type of false ideal is that of many esoteric or occult groups. Sometimes they speak about God but in a deceiving way. People who join such esoteric groups usually can receive training and go through stages in which they climb up in a hierarchy at the top of which some very powerful angels or spirits are ruling.

The third type of false ideal comes from the work of evil angels who invaded good religions. In spirit world evil angels set up teams to steal truth that was revealed by God and by good spirit world to central figures on earth. After this truth was stolen, the teams of angels work to slightly change the content of this truth. They bring in misleading ideas and the whole of it may appear as truth, but it is not anymore. They then work to bring such deviated truth to people on earth who are part of religious groups.

In case that someone lost his or her good faith in God and is not inspired anymore, it can help to check oneself if one has not fallen victim to one of the above ugly schemes.

The solution for it only lies in going back to God in deep and sincere prayer and to discover what went wrong. After realizing this we can change our lives and come back in the stream of original growth and of building up a new Foundation of Faith.

Photo art by John Eagles