2/24/69

We are told in scripture that Christ bore our sins in his body on the cross. Sin is “missing the mark” whether it be a state of health (I’m in frightful pain) or I am sorry for some other reason, and he is doing the suffering for me. So you say to someone, “How do you feel?” and he tells you, “Well, I don’t feel well…really I’m in great pain.” If you told him that Christ is doing the suffering, he would think you’re insane, because the average person has a concept of Christ as someone other than himself. That’s what man believes: Christ is something on the outside, certainly not himself. Until man discovers who Christ really is the Bible makes no sense whatsoever, none.

Here we are told, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God” (Jn. 1:1, 1:14). Now that is God dwelling in us, because if the Word is God and the Word dwells in us then God is dwelling in us. We are told that God is doing all the suffering. Now who is he? You said when I asked you “How do you feel,” you said, “I am in pain.” Well, that’s he. “What do you mean that’s God?” That’s his name…and his name and himself are one. You said, “I am in pain,” but you’re telling me that God is in pain, for that is God. There is no other God. So you say, “I am in pain,” well, is he not bearing all the sufferings? But you did not know that it was God.

Now, you may think that everyone in this world would like to awaken to that knowledge, you would think so. If I told you that it is a joy beyond measure to awaken to the knowledge of who God really is, and who you are because you are God, you would think the whole vast world would say yes to that; but may I tell you no, only an nth part would say yes to it, only an nth part. A friend of mine (who is here tonight) wrote me a letter saying, “Six months ago, my husband, who was a carpenter working for the Los Angeles schools and he was let out. He said, ‘Oh, they’ll call me, they’ll call me back.’ And that was it. Well, here recently they did call him back. When he came in, she told him that the school had called, and then reminded him that that was exactly what he said six months ago. She said he was mad as anything, so mad! She was reminding him of the seed he had planted and he didn’t want to recognize his own harvest, he didn’t want it. Then she said, “What he said to me in his madness, in his anger, I cannot tell you, I don’t remember it, but it was a contact of souls between us and I distinctly heard him say to me, ‘I am asleep and don’t you dare wake me!’” He doesn’t want to be awakened. He’s not alone, may I tell you, ninety-nine percent of the people of the world do not wish to be awakened. They feel if they awaken to this higher level, they will lose the pleasures of the flesh.

A friend of mine who was a very successful playwright in the old days of vaudeville and then radio…all the big ones were his clients. All of them that today you see on TV were his clients. He got ten percent of their gross. In those days if you made a thousand a week, that was a lot of money. He said that today people are making, well, he can’t tell what enormous sums they’re making, but something different. But in those days a cup of coffee was a nickel, it wasn’t twenty-five cents, and he was getting ten percent out of Benny, out of all of these people. He used to love me to talk to him and just tell him about my visions and my interpretations of scripture; but he said, “Now that’s enough, no more.” He didn’t want to go beyond the point to become interested, because he would lose his physical contact with life, and he was thinking only of sex. He had money, he had everything in the world that money could buy, lived beautifully, and he played the field. He was once married and he had two sons, then he was divorced, and then he became the bachelor for many, many years and he played the field in the theatrical world. Didn’t want any part of it. So when I came west He had moved out here, and at his age, he was I would say about ten years my senior, he was still of the same opinion. He saw me on TV, called me up right away and invited me out. We had him home to dinner and he was the same wonderful man, but afraid to just touch it that he may awaken to the desire to want it. Well, then a few years ago, watching TV early in the morning right after breakfast he got up from the chair and fell flat on his face and he was gone. So now he’s restored to a body just like the one before, only young, full of vigor, to continue his search and his sexual life.

But you’ll say now why? Well, “I will send a famine upon the world; it will not be a hunger for food nor a thirst for water, but for the hearing of the words of God” (Amos 8:11). That’s the famine. Until it possesses you, it makes no difference, you can talk from now to the ends of time and it doesn’t interest anyone. You can talk from now ‘til the very ends of time and tell people what I have experienced that parallels scripture and it wouldn’t interest them at all unless that famine is upon them. When that hunger is upon them for the Word of God they’ll listen and want to have the experience, and they’ll have it. So when her husband could say to her…and he meant it and he was angry…I can’t remember the words of anger, said she, but suddenly I heard him speak from within me and our souls seemed to be in communication, and we were one. He was saying to me “I am asleep. Don’t you dare wake me up!” Now, that’s that picture.

“He sent his Word into the world…” Well, if he is the Word then he sends himself, can’t send another; therefore, “He who sees me sees him who sent me.” There is no “other,” there’s only God. So whoever sees me sees him who sent me, for I am the Word, and “My word shall not return unto me void; it must accomplish that which I purpose and prosper in the thing for which I sent it” (Is. 55:11). Now what is the mission? I have sent him on a mission, sent myself on a mission. What is the mission?—to fulfill my Word. Well, I am the Word and to fulfill the Word?—yes. There is an external Word and that comes first…outer man comes first as recorded in scripture: “I send you now to fulfill my Word.” So man comes into the world with that hunger, and when the hunger is upon him, then he fulfills scripture…everything said in scripture concerning God’s plan of self-redemption. He isn’t redeeming someone else…there is no one else. We are the gods that came down (Ps. 82: 1, 6). God can only redeem himself, because there is no one else. At that moment in time when the hunger is upon us, well then, we begin to erupt within us and we unfold and scripture unfolds within us. Everything said of the Christ of scripture the individual here must experience. So you will experience scripture.

Now here, I’ve just told you one wonderful story and two others that will fit perfectly into this picture. This lady writes that she had this experience, this dream she calls it. To me it’s a vision, but call it a dream. “I am one of an enormous crowd and the crowd is yelling at a certain man and screaming at this man. I walk in quickly and I go to the very head of the crowd. I am not yelling, but the crowd is yelling and they’re saying, ‘He’s mad! He’s crazy!’ Well, I knew he was not mad, that he was not crazy, so I got forward and then turned around, faced the man, and the enormous crowd in the background still yelling, and I feel that I must tell him how much I love him, and I am telling him that I love you, I love you, and repeating it over and over. This man has been really taken over by the crowd…he was pummeled, ill-treated…matted hair and everything that is undesirable. I am still persuading him or trying to that I love him. He puts his hands on my neck and his thumbs pressed into my throat and for a moment I lost my breath. I thought, well, he’s going to kill me, but it doesn’t matter, I still love him. Even if he kills me I still love him. And then at the end, he released that pressure and the breath returned, and I continued telling him how much I loved him. Then the crowds continue to declare that he was mad. Then he raised his hands and I said to myself that now he really is going to kill me, but it doesn’t really matter because I love him, I so love him. Then the crowds vanished, he vanished, and the hands became two snow white wings, and they caressed me. All I can describe that feeling is to say that it was beyond any words to describe this love. It was a love beyond anything that one could describe when the wings came down upon me.”

I can say to you, my dear, you have fulfilled scripture. If you want the chapters, read the 40th, the 48th, the 51st, 52nd, 53rd of Isaiah and you will know what you have fulfilled. So I can say to you without any doubt in my heart that you are very near to salvation and it is hurrying speedily to you, for you have fulfilled it. The man was yourself pushed out, the crowd was yourself, everything in that wonderful vision of yours was self-pushed out, made visible. You were the one that went through hell. Now you say “I love you.” Well, can you love yourself? That wonderful thought of Blake’s in The Little Boy Lost: “Nought loves another as itself, nor can it reverence another more. Nor can thought a greater than itself know” (Songs of Experience). It can’t! How can thought know one greater than itself?

That may shock the world which thinks you can love someone more than yourself. But nought can love another more than self, nor reverence another so, nor is it possible to thought a greater than itself to know. So she was in love with the being that played all the parts…that one being with the matted hair, abused by the crowd. Well, she was the crowd over the centuries, for every time that I’ve entertained any feeling of distress, I was abusing Christ. Because, who was distressed?—I am, that’s his name. So I felt little, I felt abased, I felt debased, I felt everything that was wrong. Well, who was feeling it?—I am. That’s Christ, that’s his name. For “Unless you believe that I am is he, you die in your sins” (Jn. 8:24). Just as my friend in that vision of hers said, “Before Abraham, was I am.” When the vision revealed to her to change the comma: not “Before Abraham was, I am” but “Before Abraham, was I am” (Jn. 8:58). So in this, “Unless you believe that I am he” is recorded “Unless you believe that I am is he”—the one that you worship on the outside—“you die in your sins.”

So here, he does bear all of my afflictions, all of my sorrows, all of my diseases. Because there’s no record in scripture where a man looked at another who was in a terminal state of some disease and then took upon himself the disease, and set the man free while he went to his death with it. That’s what it would imply if you take it on the surface. For he bears our sicknesses, he bears all of our weaknesses…takes them upon himself and sets man free. But there is no record and scholars have argued over this point over the centuries. They feel this must be some vicarious set of events and it can’t be actual. It isn’t! Christ is not something external to the one who is reading about him. The universal Christ is a universal diffusion of an individuality. You say “I am,” but I say “I am”…it’s the same “I am”…and this is Christ and Christ is God and God is Jehovah. There’s only God in the world; there’s nothing but God.

So here, we are told in the 8th chapter of Matthew and told in that 1st chapter of the 1st epistle of Peter, that he bears all of my afflictions, all of my weaknesses, all of my sins, and all of my diseases, but everything is mentioned. Now who is it who is bearing it? It is Christ. And then the mind thinks, you mean another outside of myself? No it’s yourself who is bearing it and that is Christ. It’s one of the most difficult things to get over to man.

In San Francisco several years ago this lady and her son came to my meetings. He was a lawyer and they took nineteen. I gave fifteen lectures and four Sunday mornings, so they attended the nineteen. At the end of the nineteen, she said to her son, “Do you believe him?” He said, “I was raised in a profession where one has to be practical. It’s a rational profession, I’m a lawyer, but there’s something about him, he sounds sincere. He may be sincerely wrong, but I will say he does sound sincere, and so I’ll give it a go.” So every night —he was not then married…since that time he’s been married, I think, five or six times, but then he wasn’t married and he lived in the mother’s house. She would remind him every night as he went to his room to put into practice what he heard when he attended my lectures; then he would remind her to do the same thing.

Well, the next time I went back to San Francisco he had formed some organization and they were in the process of building the biggest, and it still is the biggest, and most modern co-op in San Francisco. It’s called The Comstock. The rents are outrageous. First of all, you must buy your unit, and even maintenance is beyond what anyone would think of paying for rent. But this is not only rent, you have an equity in the building…you put that thing first. Then he began to build down the peninsula, then he began to build in Hawaii, and he made his millions. He never heard the Promise. She said to me one day, “I don’t quite understand what you mean that Christ suffers for me. When I have a toothache, I have the toothache.” And I could not persuade her, although she could apply this principle towards physical ends and the son toward this enormous co-op and they did remarkably well and still are. She departed this world, but he is still floating high, wide and handsome in the financial world.

But he could not grasp that he himself, his own wonderful human Imagination, is the cause of that wonderful co-op and is the cause of everything that happens in the world, whether he knows it or not. He can’t quite believe that another other than himself is suffering…it’s not another, there is no other. You are suffering, well, that’s Christ. Who is suffering?—I am. Well, that’s Christ and there never was another Christ. There is no other Christ. God is called the Word and the Word actually became flesh and dwells within us (Jn. 1:14). If he dwells within us, why turn on the outside for a Christ? There is no other Christ. He still couldn’t get it, in spite of all that he accomplished in the world of Caesar, because the hunger is not upon him. He would not want this night to give up his fleshpots. He has all these things in the world. You turn to anyone who has enormous holding in the world and ask them—they don’t have to give it up—but ask them if they would like to have the experience that would result in regeneration, where you don’t kill it out, you don’t go to some doctor and have yourself emasculated, you don’t castrate yourself: there is no desire. The whole thing simply ceases to be. Ninety-nine percent of the people of the world would say, “What? No desire? Keep it! No desire? You just hold it! You mean I couldn’t want a lovely big steak smothered with mushrooms?” I’m not saying you wouldn’t want it, I’m not saying that at all. But I give you a pleasure transcending everything in this world…that when you go to bed at night, your night is not what it formerly was. You transcend the world of dream. You are in an entirely different world, a world of reality, a world of creativity, where those who have transcended this world are now once more part of the united body of the risen Lord and you are one with them. There’s a communion that you cannot express here. There’s not a thing here that would interest you when you are there. Well, until that famine comes upon you they cannot really accept it.

Now the third one…this lady is here tonight. She said, “In my vision you died and yet you returned. You died and not only I knew that you had died, everybody knew that you had died, and everyone knew that you had returned and that you were lecturing and teaching as you do. Well, we had to go a very long, long way to hear you. You were so far away, but you still returned after you died. I saw on your face my own earthly father’s face, but I knew the bone structure that wore that face was your bone structure. I knew it was you and everyone knew it was Neville. They didn’t know my earthly father so they didn’t see him, they saw you. But I saw my earthly father on the bone structure of your face. I couldn’t share it with anyone else because they didn’t know my father. Then at the very end I awoke. I knew if I touched the face I would feel two: I would feel my father on the surface and I would feel the Father, because everyone referred to you as the Father.”

See, there is only one Father and one God and Father of us all. It can wear every mask in the world. So here, in this wonderful picture that she had, this experience, she was seeing her earthly father upon the frame of the Father. Because the Father is a protean being and can assume every face in the world at will, instantly. To convey to her the story of Fatherhood she saw the one as foundation who told her the story of having realized Fatherhood through the Son calling him Father. So she saw the foundation, that bone structure that she knew was the man who told that story, but on it was the face of her earthly father.

So I tell you, the day is coming, and no one is going to stop it. But it can’t be forced. You are here because you are hungry and that’s why you are having the visions. That’s why you are having these experiences. That’s why you will all awaken in the not distant future. At the same time, that is why those who know of it and show a certain interest do not attend, because they don’t want to awake. I am asleep, said he, and don’t you dare wake me up! Then she said “Everything seemed all right after that. I realized then why he lost his temper, why he was angry, because in the depth of his soul he didn’t want to give up the fleshpots.” Man feels insecure if he gives up things in the world of Caesar.

So then we are told that he took upon himself the sins of the world and he was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, that he was not comely that you should want to look at him, and he was not a man of beauty that you desired him. So there’s no description of the man in whom he awoke, because it’s not a man that is majestic outwardly, not a man that you want to turn around and look at, not a man that is comely and beautiful that you want to say, “Well now, isn’t he a marvelous person.” No…a perfectly normal person as she saw it in her vision…matted hair and he had really been put through the mill by the crowd. The crowd was herself when she denied the existence of Christ within her, and that whole crowd was herself shouting that he’s mad.

Well now, she told me in her letter that she is very fond of the Book of John. That during the Depression she and her father would read the Book of John and it seemed to her a more loving book than any other book in the Bible. Well, I would not deny that, I would go along with that. She felt that in some strange way the answer to this experience would come to her from John. The 5th chapter, the 39th verse of John was her father’s favorite. That is, if you do not know it: “You search the scriptures because you think in them you have eternal life; and it’s all about me. All they have written, it’s all about me.” Well, I’ll tell you, in the 10th chapter of John, he is called mad. He said, “The man is mad and he has a devil; why do you listen to him?” (10:20). So you came to that 10th chapter, you are the central character, and the crowd screaming that you are mad is not others; it’s yourself because there is no other…there is only God.

Now, you can put this to the test and try it and see if it doesn’t work. It will prove itself in performance. If it proves itself in the testing, then you know who he is…because “By him all things were made and without him was not one thing made that was made” (Jn.1:3). So now you can take something that to you is a desirable state. If in the world of Caesar you still want the joy of marriage, the joy of a love affair, the joy of a romance, whatever it is…well then, you have no one, you know no one, assume that you had it…just assume that you had it. I tell you, in the not distant future the experience will be yours. How it will happen, you don’t know, no one knows. It will happen if you persist in the assumption that it has happened.

My wife told me this morning that when she got up on the early side, too early to really get up, and so she returned to bed. She said to herself, “What do I want most in this world? I want my husband and my daughter to be blissfully happy. Then I started thinking what would make them happy. I said, oh, no. I can’t visualize what would make them happy. It’s something that they and they alone would know. I mustn’t tell them what would make them the happiest in the world. And so I began then to dwell only on their happiness, and I fell into a sleep. In my dream here are the three of us…you are on a couch and you’re saying to me, ‘I don’t feel comfortable here.’ I said, well, you know you don’t like to sleep on the first floor, you like to be elevated and sleep above, so that’s why you aren’t comfortable on the couch. Then I ignored that section of it and then there was a puzzle and Vicky and I were putting all these pieces together. It was very, very amusing how these things would fall into their little places. I can’t tell you what little thing I picked up or she picked up, but suddenly she began to laugh, and it was the most delightful laugh that I’ve ever heard coming from her. I looked at her after this thing fell into its place and it was perfect. I’ve never seen Vicky so pretty, so happy and so blissfully happy. And then I woke.”

So in the immediate present it was answered in the depths of her being. It must now come to the surface. She figured why waste the time…it’s too early to get up…let me be constructive and apply this principle now. So she wondered, “What do I want most in this world?” Forgetting herself and thinking of the two she loves most, she thought, well now, if they were the happiest people in the world, and that’s what she wanted, it would make her happy if we were. I was on the couch and I couldn’t find any rest in that first floor. So she ignored this part of it and she turned to Vicky and they found this puzzle. There she is putting all the pieces together and then this little chuckle that she never heard coming from her before. Then an expression and a feeling and a mood that transcended anything she had ever seen in Vicky before. Then she knew she did find that happiness that she had asked for.

So may I tell you, Jesus Christ is your own wonderful human Imagination. It can’t be repeated too often, because when you read the story and you’re told that he—for they use the pronoun, the third person—he is doing all the suffering for us and you know that you are suffering, well, he isn’t taking it all because I’m suffering, and that’s he. For “Unless you believe that I am is he”—you will continue to miss the mark—“you will continue in your sins,” for that’s what you’re told in scripture. But, if I really believe that I am—when I say “I am” and I know I am is the he of scripture that is defined as Christ Jesus and Christ Jesus is defined as God the Father—well then, I know who I am.

So I came into the world for one purpose: to fulfill the Word. “My Word cannot return unto me empty’ it must accomplish that which I purposed and prosper in the thing for which I sent it.” So I sent myself into the world. I sent it to fulfill what I had dictated through the prophets. I inspired the prophets to tell a story: that I came not only to fulfill it, but in my fulfilling of that story to interpret it for the world. For on the surface, until you actually experience it you can’t interpret it. It defies interpretation. But when one actually fulfills it, he interprets the prophecy. For the Old Testament is only a prophetic blueprint of what you and I must one day realize, and we realize it in ourselves as the central character of scripture. We are the Jehovah of the Bible; we are the Jesus Christ of the Bible. If it shocks anyone, let them be shocked, but don’t retract for one moment. I tell you it’s true. Don’t take it back for one second and say, “Well, I’ll modify it for you.” Don’t modify it! They either accept it or they don’t accept it.

But I’m telling you it’s true and there is no other Christ. The Christ of scripture is not a single little man; it’s that universally diffused individuality, it’s the cosmic Christ, and it’s all one. So in one it awakes, in two it awakes, in the third it awakes, and eventually the whole will awake. And the one body that was fragmented is reunited into that one glorious body and we are once more reunited, after having gone into the world of death and overcome it. For this was our challenge: to be victorious over death. So everyone dies here, but everyone. The universe, they tell us, is actually melting. It may take unnumbered billions, but it melts and therefore it will one day come to its end…so they say. I’m not going to question these men. I only know in our own case, we came into the world of death for the purpose of overcoming death. Nothing dies in this world but nothing, because we are the immortal being clothed in these garments of flesh and only the garments of flesh die, they all die.

But I can’t force anyone to want it [the Promise]. I go to Barbados to my family and they are not interested, not for one moment. I could not hold the interest of any member of my family for two minutes in telling them what I’m telling you tonight. They’re not interested. They all live in comfort, live in clover, and they know that I don’t earn what they earn. So their standard by which they judge success is what you have in the world of Caesar. They all have homes and cars and a lovely income and big salaries and perquisites beyond measure. Each gets a new car every year out of the business, all repairs on their homes, they pay no taxes; the business pays all taxes, all repairs. They have set it up so that they really live in clover. But I don’t live there and I have to pay my own way here and they think me insane. Got a call yesterday that I’m coming back to Barbados in the summer. I said that I haven’t the slightest plan to come to Barbados. Well, they are planning it anyway. Regardless of what I’m doing, they’re planning it…that I must come and live there. They’re determined on that score, because they can’t see any reason for a man at my age persisting in doing what I’m doing when clover is there for me.

So, I can’t persuade my family because the hunger is not upon them…it just isn’t upon them. “I will send a famine upon the world and it will not be a hunger for bread or a thirst for water but for the hearing of the Word of God.” Until that hunger possesses you, I don’t care what the world will tell you, it doesn’t make any difference. You will not truly…you may become a pope, but it doesn’t mean because you become the pope that you had a hunger for the Word of God. You could have had a hunger for the power that rests in the office of the pope, a hunger for being president, an enormous power, and that could be the hunger. But the hunger—not to be recognized, not to be hailed—to experience the Word of God…for you know you were sent, you are a Word, and you sent yourself. Well, “He who sees me sees him who sent me” and you came in to fulfill the Word. Because there must be two witnesses: the external witness of scripture and the internal witness of the Spirit; because no one but you who has the experience could witness to it. So you know you parallel all the scriptures and you know in the depths of your own being stands the Father watching to see does it really fit? Is this the image of my declared purpose? For I have prophesied that this must take place and now he has fulfilled it…now he is the image of the invisible God and radiates the glory of God and is the express image of his person.

So he can be used as the bone structure on which every face can be placed to reveal to the one who has the experience the meaning of being God the Father. So, in her vision, she said, everyone, including herself, “referred to you as the Father,” definitive, not a Father, but the Father. Her father was a father; I was the Father on which a father’s face was placed. She knew that I had died and she knew that I had returned. Though I had died and everyone knew I had died, everyone knew I had returned to continue the telling of the only story worth while telling in the world: the story of God’s plan of salvation to redeem not another, there is no other, to redeem himself. There is no other. It’s all self-redemption, so no one can be lost, but no one; but each in its own order.

So, thank you for your three letters and please keep them up. No matter what they seem to you…as the lady wrote saying, “I don’t quite understand this, but I’m going to write it anyway and this is what happened. That man I saw time and again in my dreams, I’ve seen him so often in my dreams, now he was really taken over. He was battered and beaten…matted hair.” Read the 53rd chapter of the Book of Isaiah and you’ll see what they do to the Christ in man. But the “they” is yourself pushed out, and not knowing who you are, you do it to yourself. So you represented all the people in the world or they represented you, and they were beating you, and you bore the stripes. As told in that chapter, like a lamb before his slaughter or slaughters he’s dumb and opens not his mouth, so he, the servant of the Lord, opens not his mouth. So you read him when you go home, because you’ve fulfilled Isaiah, my dear, and you’re right on the verge of salvation. May I tell you, with that I would say that it’s hurrying towards you.

Now are there any questions? Before we go into the Silence are there any questions?

Q: (inaudible)

A: It means the words are not in the print and they’ve added those words to give meaning. So when you read it in the King James, all the little words put in italics, that’s not in the print, that is not in the script, but to give meaning to the one who reads it in English, they added these words. They tell you it’s not in the script…they put it that way.

Q: (inaudible)

A: No…the Revised Standard Version will give you footnotes concerning what the true meaning of the Hebrew or the Greek is. But all the little italics that means that the word isn’t there, just isn’t there. It’s the most amazing thing when you sit down to read it to see what the scholars have done, because, if they haven’t the vision, they must give meaning to the script, and so they add. I read today for instance in that 18th verse of the 1st chapter of John that “No one has ever seen God. The Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.” Well, that word Son supplanted the word God in the 4th Century. We have no early manuscript before the 4th Century that uses the word Son…it is God. It doesn’t state that, but it does state that in the Exegesis that no earlier than the 4th Century. You’ll find our earliest manuscripts are fantastic when you compare them to what man has done to give sense to the script. Yet to say that no one has ever seen God, that’s a contradiction in the Sermon on the Mount; for you are told that a certain person or persons will see God. All will see God because they’re going to find themselves. But here we are told, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God,” well, that certainly contradicts that statement. And it’s not the Son called Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is God the Father; the Son that reveals him is David. I will this very night put my head right here and not recant one little comma to that statement: it is David who reveals man as God the Father! I haven’t met one priest, one rabbi, one minister, who will accept this, because they’ve been conditioned and they have a pre-fabricated misconception of scripture. We are the gods and collectively we form the God. We form God the Father.

Any other questions, please? Then let us go into the Silence.

* * *

I will ask this lady tonight when she goes home…in that 53rd chapter of Isaiah when it begins, “Who has believed our report? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”…that “arm of the Lord” in Hebrew when it’s translated literally it is “the arm of Jehovah upon whom has it been revealed?” The world thinks it’s just might, sheer might, and this lady discovered that it was infinite mercy. The arms that she thought would kill her…and she didn’t care because she loved him…turned into a love and a compassion that she found herself inadequate to describe. She couldn’t describe the love, the feeling when these wings possessed her. So that instead of being hands that would squeeze her—a moment before they squeezed the wind out of her body—and now the same hands disappeared and turned into wings. You read the story of the wings in scripture. These are the wings of compassion, the wings of mercy. So his hands turned into the hands of mercy.

Good night.

Main photo: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel Gustave Doré, 1855