Whom God Has Afflicted
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Tonight’s subject is: “Whom God Has Afflicted.”
“Whom God has afflicted for Secret Ends,
He comforts and Heals and calls them Friends.” [Blake, from “The Everlasting Gospel”]
In the 119th Psalm it says:
“This my comfort in my affliction
That thy promise gives me life.
* * * *
Before I was afflicted I went astray; But now I keep thy word.
* * * *
It is good for me that I was afflicted, That I might learn thy statutes.” (Psalm 119:5, 67, 71)
And then we are told in the book of Job, the 36th chapter: “He delivers the afflicted by their affliction, And opens their ear by adversity.” (Job 36:15)
Now, whom does He do it to? To what Being is He doing it? Well, let us turn to Scripture. The book of Genesis is the “seed” plot of the entire Bible. It is all there, but it is an adumbration. It’s a foreshadowing in a not altogether conclusive or immediately evident way, but it is all in Genesis. And the book begins in this manner:
“In the beginning God,…” and then it ends in this manner:
“… in a coffin in Egypt.”
“In the beginning God” – “in a coffin in Egypt.”
The story is all about God. Everything in the world is God. I am looking only at God masked as I look at you. Behind that mask is God! And the whole thing is done by God to Himself. So here, “Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep Thy word.” It’s my own word that I pronounced before I came down into this world of “death.”
Here is a vision that might aid the understanding of this mystery. She is not here tonight; she gave me the letter last lecture night. She said, “I had this vision. I was Infinite Spirit, and I knew I was Infinite Spirit. There was nothing but my Self. And I desired to go out into the world, although seemingly there was no other place – no ‘world,’ yet I desired to go out into the world, but I knew I had to have form to be seen, to communicate, and I made for myself a box – a long, elongated box – of wood. And then suddenly there was absolute darkness. You can’t conceive of the blackness and the restriction – a complete restriction, as though you could not concentrate or bring oneself to any greater point of restriction than that moment, as I found myself in the box. That was the cause of the blackness and the restriction and the contraction.
“The box could see, it could hear, it could speak, it could move; it could do everything that I willed it to do. And then came that moment in time when I desired to leave it. It came the end. I had experienced what it was to see and to think and to hear in this world of ‘death.’ And then I found myself looking down on what I thought to be my bed. I thought a body was on it, but I couldn’t quite see it because of the crowd around the body. On three sides of the bed were people looking down, bending over; and then one said, ‘She is dead.’ And I thought, ‘Dead? Why that’s impossible! It cannot die. It has never lived! Only when I occupied it – when I was in it – did it seem to live. But it cannot die.’ So they said, ‘The box is dead.’ Why, the box has never been alive – only as I occupied it. Only as I entered into that box did it become seemingly alive. And the shock was so great that I awoke.”
It’s a marvelous vision. We are “wearing” this “box.” Now, the box, in Hebrew – the word translated “box” also means “ark.” It means, also, a “coffin.”
So, “In the beginning God,… in a coffin in Egypt.” I am the first and the last, the beginning and the end. So, God actually became man for a purpose beyond the wildest dream of the “box” in which God is now residing. He reached the limit of contraction by becoming man, that He may expand beyond the wildest dream of Himself prior to the contraction. It is a constant expansion of The One Being that is God. And you are that Being!
We are Elohim. We are the gods that came down and assumed the limitation of man, and it is an affliction. But He afflicts Himself!
“Thou also sufferest with me, although I behold Thee not…