Neville Goddard Lectures: “Ends, Ultimate and Temporary”

08 Apr Neville Goddard Lectures: “Ends, Ultimate and Temporary”

March 17, 1972

I think you’ll find tonight an interesting night, for we are taking ends, the ultimate end and then the temporary ends. For it is the end that gives meaning to all that goes before. The Psalmist said, “Lord, let me know my end and the number of my days.” We read, “Fear not, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom of Heaven.” That’s the ultimate end. In giving you the Kingdom of Heaven, he gives you himself, for you can equate heaven with God. God is able to give himself to all of us, to each of us.

And the gift comes suddenly and without warning, after the tribulation of human experience. He said, “I have tried you in the furnaces 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.” And when we read the story in the book of Exodus, we see that glory and God are equated: “I’ll make my glory to pass before you. And when I pass by, so the I and glory are synonymous.” He cannot give himself to another. So, the furnaces are simply to change man into himself. He became as I am, that I may be as he is. And so, I pass through the tribulation of human experience and then the end comes suddenly. The event comes in unique and unpredictable ways. Man thinks you can discover the way without having experienced it; you can’t do it. For when you experience it, listen to the words carefully now, taken from the 48th chapter of Isaiah, the third verse: “The former things I declared, although they went forth from my mouth, I made them known. Then suddenly I did them and they came to pass.”

Now here, the one proclaiming what is going to be done, his intention; but no one could fulfill it. He had to fulfill it himself. So, if he would give me himself, he has to fulfill it in me. So, when this unpredictable, unique event takes place, it takes place in the first person, single tense, in me. And it comes suddenly without warning. So, when I actually experience the gift of God to me, it isn’t someone on the outside giving me something; he rises within me, and rising within me, he gives himself to me. Then I know who I am. And he set the entire thing out for us in his word. If I have heard, undoubtedly you have heard too. You’ve heard preachers claim that they met Jesus and they’re waiting for him to return. I know I have heard them. I dare say you have; if you haven’t actually heard them as I did, then you read their words, claiming that they actually met him in spirit. And then you ask them, and they are going to tell me who is Jesus and they’ll reply, well, Jesus is the Son of God.

Then you can say to them, if you know Scripture, if you met him and you saw him and you say he is the Son of God, well, then you must be God. They’ll be startled, shocked, and think that you are blaspheming. And yet we are told that no one knows the Son except the Father, for if they know him and they met him, they must be the Father. If they met him, and they claimed they met him, well, then they must be God the Father. I can tell you, you can say right into their face, you are a liar; some grand hallucination, because you cannot meet him from without. When you know God, you know him through his Son and you want me to know him through Jesus.

Jesus is the Father and David is the Son. When you meet David, you know that he is your Son and because he is God’s Son, then you know who you are. And there’s no other way to know God, it’s the only way; it comes in unique and unpredictable ways, the entire story of Scripture. So, “The former things I declared are old, they went forth from my mouth and I made them known when suddenly I acted and they came to pass.” Read it in the 40th chapter of Isaiah and the word Isaiah simply means, Jehovah says. It’s the same meaning as the word Jesus. The same meaning as the word Jehovah. Jehovah is salvation. Jesus means Jehovah is salvation. The word Jesus and Jehovah are interchangeable terms. No one can say Jesus is Lord, except by the Holy Spirit.