Neville Goddard Lectures: “Personifications, Not Persons”

24 Jun Neville Goddard Lectures: “Personifications, Not Persons”

6/20/69

In the Book of Nehemiah we are told that “They read from the book, from the law of God with interpretation, and they gave the sense so that the people understood the reading” (8:8). I wish that were true of today’s preachers; but unfortunately they have mistakenly taken personifications for persons and the gross first sense for the ultimate sense intended.

Here in today’s paper 325 graduate students of fifteen Catholic colleges were asked to name their ten heroes in the order that they are to them heroic. No restrictions as to time…they can go back in time as far as they feel like…and Jesus came in fifth. They see him as a person. But even if he were a person, he is fifth in the order. Now, these are graduate students of fifteen Catholic colleges. The late President Kennedy came in first and his brother, Robert, came in second and Martin Luther King came in third…here came the order, ten of them. And you wonder what are they getting? After four years in college they still see the book as secular history. If you never went to college all well and good, but if you read it as literature as many of them do in college you would discover it is not secular history.

Now here, in biblical thought a name is not a mere label of identification; it is an expression of the essential nature of its bearer. A man’s name reveals his character. To know the name of God is to know God as he has revealed himself. As the Psalmist said, “Those who know thy name put their trust in thee” (Ps.9:10). But it is a progression of revelations of the name. It is first revealed as God Almighty in the name El Shaddai. Then it comes in the name of plain awareness, I AM. We are told the first was given to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, just as Almighty Power. Then the second revelation came to Moses and that was given as awareness, I AM. The full disclosure of his name we find in Jesus Christ, and that was the name of Father…a father-son relationship. “I have made manifest thy name to the men whom thou gavest me out of the world. They were thine and thou gavest them to me. I have made known unto them thy name and I will make it known that the love with which thou hast loved me may be in them and I in them” (Jn.17:6).

But now, who are these characters? They have names too. We speak of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Jesus. Are they persons? No they are not persons. They are personifications of the eternal states of God’s play, and man has completely mistaken these as persons as you are a person and I am a person. These states are eternal. Learn to distinguish between man and his present state. In what state is the man now? It begins with Abraham. The call of Abraham as a state; the state of love, the state…he was a friend of God. The state of faith is really what the state is. In that state, you and I were shown the entire play in detail. Then the play comes to its climax and fulfillment in the state called Jesus Christ. It’s a state and when you reach that state then the play is over…and you are the author of the play.

But to say he is my hero and I put him fifth as a person is to completely misunderstand the story in the Bible. It’s not understood at all if you can name him among characters that are characters of history. As Blake said that it ought always to be understood when you open the Bible and you are reading anything in the Bible, “It ought always to be understood that the persons Moses and Abraham are not here meant, but the states signified by those names; the individuals being representatives or visions of those eternal states as they were revealed to mortal man in the series of divine revelations as they are written in the Bible.” Now he said, “I have seen these states in my Imagination; when seen at a distance they appear as one man, but as you approach they appear multitudes of nations” (Vis. Las Judg., Pp.76-77).