Neville Goddard Lectures: “The Congregation of God” (1966)

02 Sep Neville Goddard Lectures: “The Congregation of God” (1966)

By Neville Goddard

11/1/66

Tonight’s subject is “The Congregation of God.” The Bible speaks of the assembly of God, the gathering of God, the congregation of God. If I say to you, you are the body of Christ and individually members of it, would you believe it? Well, I’ve only quoted Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, “partakers of the same body, partakers of the promise” (1Cor.12:12).

Now, in scripture only one set—they’re given two names—is excluded from the assembly of God. We are told that they all gathered as one man in the square before the watergate, and they said to the scribe, Ezra, “Bring the book, the law, the law of Moses that the Lord gave to Israel.” Ezra brought it and read from the 23rd chapter of Deuteronomy, “No Ammonite or Moabite shall enter the assembly of the Lord forever” (Deut.23:3). Now why this exclusion? Who are the Moabites and who are the Ammonites? As Blake said, “That which can be made explicit to the idiot isn’t worth my time” and the ancients felt that what was not too explicit was fittest for instruction because it rouses the faculties to act.

So you look up the word Moab or Moabite and look up the word Ammon or Ammonite, it gives you no light, none whatsoever. But you read the story…just read it…and you will see they are the offspring of incest, the offspring of Lot’s sons and daughters. Is that wrong? The child was born; nothing wrong in that. It’s not saying that the child born of incest is not born of God. But that shows you segregation. We have segregation not only in races, we have it in society, we have it in every walk of life. You are completely out of the social register if you marry outside of what they consider the proper people. We have race against race; we have religion against religion. In the Protestant world, the Catholic world, all Christians, they do not sanction inter-marriage. I have three brothers married to Catholics. They couldn’t get married in the regular church, married on the side. So they had to go into some little chapel to get married because they weren’t blessed and their wives were. But they’re good providers and wonderful fathers. One sired five and the other two sired four each. The children have all gone to college, sent not by their mothers, who didn’t have one penny to rub against the other, but sent by their fathers who had the money to send them to college. So here, they couldn’t come into the regular church. That was taboo. You find it in the social world, the racial world, all over. “They shall not enter the assembly of God.”

Well, how will I go about it if I am of that world? Man is redeemed through the death of his delusions. You wait…everyone will be redeemed, because he’ll be put into situations where these delusions created in this false manner will all disappear. I have watched it. I have watched men who hated certain races, certain nations, and their salvation came through that race and that nation. Right here, he told me…this chap born of Irish background, Catholic. They came from Ireland. He was born in Boston and raised in that very limited environment, where nothing was right but a good Irish Catholic. He said, “I hated two people in the world: I hated the Jew and I hated the Negro. Then came the 2nd World War and I was a sergeant in the Pacific. The Japanese had us pinned down. I couldn’t move, I just couldn’t move…my entire company pinned down. The slightest motion and the machine guns simply swept us. On my left was a Jew. Because he was a Jew, I gave him all the dirty work in the company. I was a Catholic and he a Jew, and I threw everything I should not have, because he was really not worthy of that treatment.