Neville Goddard Lectures: “J, E And P Manuscripts”

05 Nov Neville Goddard Lectures: “J, E And P Manuscripts”

10/3/69

I think you’ll find tonight very interesting. In the Book of Genesis which begins one of the manuscripts…there are three that we have, the J, the E and the P manuscripts. That’s all the authors that we know of, and no one knows who they are. Scholars claim all kinds of things for these initials, but regardless of that, tonight we will begin with the E, which begins with the 15th chapter of Genesis. It doesn’t mention the first fourteen. And here is the story, “As the sun was going down, Abram fell into a deep sleep; and a dread and great darkness fell upon him. The Lord said to him, ‘Know for a surety that your descendants will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs, and they will be slaves there, and they will be oppressed for four hundred years… and after that they will come out with great possessions’” (Gen.15:12). Abram believed and it was accounted unto him as righteousness.

Here, we see that it is not what man is but what man trusts God to do that saves him. Here, he believes that God the Father has prepared the way for his banished ones to return. He firmly believed that there was a way. He accepted the verdict that they would be enslaved for four hundred years. Now when you read it you might think in terms of time as you and I think of time, but that is not part of the mystery. In the Hebrew alphabet each letter has a numerical value and a symbolic value. The last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Toph, has the numerical value of 400, and the symbolic value of a cross. The cross is the body that you wear. It doesn’t mean 400 years, or 4000 years, or four of anything. It’s simply the numerical value of the cross which is the last letter. When you reach the end of the journey then there is a way prepared to bring you out of this experience in the world of death. For here is a world of death: everything begins, it waxes, it wanes and it dies, but everything. The very stars are melting…everything is dying…but it must first reach its fullness and then it disappears.

But he has prepared a way for his sons who were banished into the world of death to return to him, and when they return, they return with great possessions. Certainly not anything on earth, like homes, since everything here dissolves and disintegrates. And so, we must find what the possession is that comes out of this experience in the world of death. Here, no matter what you have you are enslaved by it. You buy a home and you start paying insurance on it right away to protect it against all kinds of things. Here in the Western world, earthquakes; all over the world, fires; certain sections, hurricanes. But no matter what it is it’s against loss. You get a huge big diamond and you’re so proud of it, and you insure it against loss, and you pay on it for the rest of your days. Many a person owning a fortune in diamonds puts them in a vault and they never sees them and pays on them year after year…but they have the feeling of possession. All they do is pay the insurance on them, because they wouldn’t run the risk of wearing them in public. So they get duplicates made out of inferior material and wear that, while they know they actually own the original in the vault. Now that’s an actual fact and that’s all over the world.

So here, it is not anything that you own in this world that you will take out and call it great possessions. Tonight we will see what this great possession is that we actually take out after the journey of 400 years. The 400 years will be determined in a certain manner. The Old Testament is a prophetic blueprint which is fulfilled in the New. It is not cut and dried so that you can actually see exactly what it is talking about. It’s a foreshadowing in a not altogether conclusive or immediately evident way. Then it happens and is recorded in the New, but even then it is not, I would say, conclusive and vivid so that man can see it. So we must search the scriptures to see just what you and I must experience in order to depart from this world of death and take with us this fantastic gift that we actually acquire by coming into the world of death. You and I pre-existed. When we speak of God, there is only one God so he could send no one but himself…for the son and the Father are one. He sends his sons into the world, and it takes all the sons to make the Father.