Neville Goddard Lectures: “God Only Acts” (1966)

17 May Neville Goddard Lectures: “God Only Acts” (1966)

9/20/66

Tonight’s subject is “God Only Acts.” You may ask how could a thoughtful man born as we were born and who will die as we will die know that? Yet I tell you I know it from experience. I told you in the card that I sent you that this is on the Word of God. I have experienced the Word of God, so tonight I will tell you, and I will tell you from my own personal experience how I know that God alone acts. The name of God is the key to understanding the biblical doctrine of God. In biblical terms the question is not does God exist, but who is our God? What is his name and what is his Son’s name? For Israel, the personal name of God is I AM. You can read that in scripture, as I read it in scripture, but I didn’t know it until I experienced it.

Let us go back tonight to an experience of mine that took place in 1929, it was in the summer of ’29. Before I quote the passage from the 82nd Psalm, let me say that the editor of the most scholarly of all high criticisms of scripture, his name was Thomas K. Cheyne; he was the editor of the Encyclopedia Biblica. You will find this statement concerning the book in both the Americana that is the great dictionary, American dictionary, and great British dictionary, called Britannica, that it is by far the most scholarly of all higher biblical criticisms. This is what he said of the 82nd Psalm. He said, “It makes the strongest demands on the historical Imagination of the interpreter. The ideas may be perennial, but the outer forms are no longer understood.”

Now let me quote the passages in this Psalm that disturbed this great professor. He was the outstanding biblical professor of the day at Oxford University, a master of the Hebrew tongue. He interpreted the entire Old Testament from the original scripture. And here was this master, in his day the giant, and he’s still considered…his book of Psalms as we have in our library is still considered tops in translation. When he said, “It’s the greatest demand of all Psalms on the historic Imagination of the interpreter.” He confesses that the ideas there may be perennial, and still they are, but then he said as far as understanding them they have long been forgotten to man.

Now there are two verses in the very short Psalm that disturbed the great professor, the first and the sixth. The first is this, “God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment.” That’s the first verse. In the sixth, “I say you are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, you shall die like men, and fall as one man, O princes.” You read it in your 82nd Psalm. Now the crux of the interpretation hangs upon the meaning that the interpreters will give to the word Elohim. And may I tell you, I have read so many commentaries, I have many exegeses at home, and they differ widely. Yet the word Elohim is simply stated in scripture as God. It’s a plural word. It first appears in the very first verse of Genesis. “In the beginning God…” that’s the first time it appears; it’s singular, yet the word is plural. In the 26th verse it reappears, and here we find the word now plural, “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’” Here we find it now in its plural form. In this 82nd Psalm, the word Elohim appears twice, in the first verse and then in the 6th verse. In the 1st verse, “And God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods”—that’s plural—“he holds judgment.” Well, the historic Imagination is concerned only with the facts of secular history. There is no record on earth…even though no history book agrees with another history book on the same event, still they were facts. We know that the Battle of Waterloo was fought, we know the Civil War here was fought, the 1st and 2nd World Wars were fought, and now we’re fighting another one. But no historian in telling the story of these events will tell it in the same manner. They will see it through different eyes, but they were recording facts.