Resurrection (1966)
17 Jul Neville Goddard: “Resurrection” (1966) [FULL BOOK]
By Neville (1966)
“Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel.”
Jesus’ ministry began after that of John ended in Judea. “Jesus, when He began His ministry, was about thirty years of age.”
The soil of the centuries had been ploughed and harrowed for the gospel of God. And men began to experience God’s plan of salvation.
The authors of the gospel of God are anonymous, and all that we can really know about them must be derived from our own experience of scripture. Their authority was not in scripture as a dead written code but in their own experience of scripture. Their gospel was not a new religion but the fulfillment of one as old as the faith of Abraham. “And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham” (Gal. 3:8). And Abraham believed God and lived in accordance with the preview of the story of salvation that God granted to him.
The unknown authors of the gospel emphasize the fulfillment of scripture in the life of Jesus Christ. Christ in us fulfills the scripture. “Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you?” (2 Cor. 13:5). “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). “For if we have been united with Him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like his” (Rom. 6:4).
The repetition in us, through His indwelling, has been expressed by Johann Scheffler, a seventeenth-century mystic.
“Though Christ a thousand times In Bethlehem be born,
If He’s not born in thee, Thy soul is still forlorn.”
— Edward Thomas
“And He said to them, ‘O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into His glory?’ And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, He interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning Himself… everything written about Me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled. Then He opened their minds to understand the scriptures” (Luke 24:25-27, 44-45).
“And they read from the book, from the law of God, with interpretation, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading” (Nehemiah 8:8).
The Old Testament is a prophetic blueprint of the life of Jesus Christ. The gospel of God is the revelation of the future granted to Abraham. “Abraham rejoiced that he was to see My day” (John 8:56). It is about the risen Christ. Participation in the life of the age to come depends on God’s act of raising the dead. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is God’s victory. That we shall be “united with Him in a resurrection like His” is the promise of God’s victory for all.
But before the day of victory, man must be refined in the furnace of affliction. “I have tried you in the furnace 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” (Isaiah 48:10-11). It takes the furnace of affliction to conform us to the image of His Son, and therefore to the image of the Father, for the Father and the Son are one.
“Then came to him all his brothers and sisters and all who had known him before… and comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him… And the Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning” (Job 42:11-12). The story of Job is the story of man, the innocent victim of a cruel experiment on the part of God. “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image'” (Gen. 1:26). Yet “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed in us” (Rom. 8:18) and that glory is nothing less than the unveiling of God the Father in us, as us.