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November 5th, 1916
Received by James Padgett
Washington D.C.
I am here, St. Luke.
I come tonight to write you a message upon the truth of: What
the Holy Spirit is. I know that the orthodox generally believe
and classify it as a part of the Godhead, being one with and the
equal of God, the Father, and not merely a manifestation of the
Father, as spirit, and hence, necessarily identical with the Father,
though having a different and distinct personality. In this belief
and in this classification is included Jesus, having a distinct
personality.
The orthodox preachers and theological writers teach that it is
a fact that these three are one, co-equal and existing, and that
fact is the great mystery of God, and that men should not endeavor
to fathom the mystery, because the sacred things of God are His
own, and it is not lawful for men to enter into these secrets. Well
this declaration and admonition are very wise as men's wisdom goes,
and saves the expounders of these doctrines of mystery from attempting
to explain what they cannot explain, because it is impossible for
them to unravel that which as a fact, has no existence.
Men of thought all down the ages have sought to understand this
great mystery, as they called it, and have been unsuccessful, and
as the early fathers met with the same defeat in their endeavors
to understand the mystery, and, then because of such defeat, declared
the explanation of the doctrine to be a secret of God, not to be
inquired into by men, so all these other investigators of the church
when they became convinced of the futility of the search, adopted
the admonition of the old fathers that God's secret must not be
inquired into, for it belonged to Him alone, and sinful man and
the redeemed man also must respect God's secret. And thus from the
beginning of the established church, after the death of Jesus and
his apostles, was declared this doctrine of the trinity - one in
three and three in one, yet only one - and made the vital foundation
stone of their visible church's existence. Of course, from time
to time, there arose men, both in the church, who, having more enlightenment
than their brothers in the church, attempted to gainsay the truth
of the doctrine and declared and maintained that there was only
one God, the Father.
But they were in the minority, and not acting with the more powerful,
their views were rejected; and the mystery became the church's sacred
symbol of truth, unexplainable and therefore more certain and entitled
to more credence. And it seems to be the tendency of men's minds,
or at least of those who believe in the Bible as the inspired word
of God, to welcome and encourage as the more wonderful and important
and the more to be cherished those things which savor of the mysterious,
rather than those which a man may read and understand as he runneth.
(Habbakuk 2:2).
Nowhere, not even in the Bible (Ref *), is there any saying of
Jesus to the effect that God is tripartite, consisting of the Father,
Son and Holy Ghost; and, as a fact, never did Jesus when on earth
teach any such doctrine, but only this: that the Father is God and
the only God, and that he, Jesus, is his son and the first
fruits of the resurrection from the dead, and that the Holy
Ghost is God's messenger for conveying the Divine Love, and as such,
the comforter.
I know that in some of the Gospels, as now contained in the Bible
and adopted as canonical, it is said, in effect, that the Godhead
consists of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost - these three are one
- but such Gospels do not contain the truth in this respect and
are not the same Gospels that were originally written. These original
Gospels have been added to and taken from in the passing of the
years and in the copying and the recopying that occurred before
the adoption of the same.
They, the adopted ones, were compiled from many writings, and as
the compilers in those early times differed in their opinions as
men do now respecting religious truths, the more powerful of these
having authority to declare what should be accepted, according to
their interpretations of those manuscripts that were being copied,
directed the copies to be made in accord with their ideas, and I
may say, desires, and announced and put forth such productions to
be true copies of the originals. And as these copies were successively
made the preceding ones were destroyed, and hence the earliest existing
manuscripts of these Gospels came into being many years after the
originals from which they were claimed to be compiled, were written
and destroyed.
And I, Luke, who did write a gospel and who am acquainted with
the present gospel ascribed to me, say that there are many vital
things and declarations, that I never wrote and that are not true,
contained in it; and many truths that I did write are not contained
therein - and so with the other gospels.
In none of our Gospels did the mystery of the Godhead appear, and
that for the reason that there was not and is not, and we did not
teach that there was any Godhead, composed of three personalities.
Only one God, the Father. Jesus was a son of man in the natural
sense, and a son of God in the spiritual sense, but he was not God
or a part of God in any sense except that he possessed the Divine
Love of the Father, and in that sense was a part of His Essence.
The Holy Spirit was not God, but merely His instrument - a Spirit
- the Holy Spirit.
As you have been informed, the soul of man existed prior to man's
creation in the flesh, and was the only part of man that was made
in the image of God. It existed in this pristine state without individuality,
though having a personality, and resembled the Great Soul of the
Almighty, which Soul is God Himself; though the soul that was given
to man was not a part of the Great Soul, merely a likeness of it.
Some of you mortals have said that man's soul is a part of the
"Oversoul," meaning the Soul of God, but this is not true, and if
in any of our communications it has been said that the soul of man
is a part of the Soul of God, and I mean while it existed before
its incarnation, our saying must not be so interpreted. The ego
of God as may be said, is the Soul, and from this Soul, emanates
all the manifested attributes of God, such as power and wisdom and
love - but not jealousy or wrath or hatred, as some of the writers
of the Bible have said, for He possesses no such attributes. The
ego of man is the soul, and in his created purity and perfection
from his soul emanated all the manifested attributes belonging to
him, such as power and love and wisdom; and neither were jealousy
nor hatred nor wrath attributes of his before his fall.
It is said that man is composed of body, soul and spirit, and this
is true. From your life's experience you know what the body is,
and I have told you what the soul is, and now the question arises,
what is the spirit? I know that there have been for centuries great
differences of opinion among theologians and other wise men as to
what the spirit is; some contending that it and the soul are the
same thing, and others, that the spirit is the real ego of man and
the soul something of less quality and subordinate to the spirit,
and others having other views, and all wrong, for as I have said
the soul is the ego, and everything else connected with man and
forming a part at his creation when he was pronounced to be "very
good," is subordinate to the soul, and only its instrumentality
for manifesting itself.
As Jesus has told you, the spirit is the active energy of the soul
and the instrumentality by which the soul manifests itself; and
this definition applies to the spirit of man while a mortal as well
as when he becomes an inhabitant of the spirit world. The spirit
is inseparable from the soul, and has no function in the existence
of man, except to make manifest the potentialities of the soul in
its activities. Spirit is not life, but it may become an evidence
of life - it is life's breath.
And as man was created in the image of his Maker - and as spirit
is only the active energy of the soul, by the application of the
principle of correspondences, which one of your former psychics
declared to exist, it may be assumed and it is truth, that the Holy
Spirit is the active energy of the Great Soul of the Father, and,
as we know from our experiences and observations, is used as the
messenger of the Father to convey to mankind His Divine Love. And
I do not mean to restrict the mission of the Holy Spirit to mankind
in the flesh, for it also conveys and bestows this Great Love upon
the souls of the Father's children who are spirits without the bodies
of bone and flesh, and who are inhabitants of the spirit world.
And so, it is a truth that the Holy Spirit is not God and no part
of the Godhead, but merely His messenger of Truth and Love emanating
from his Great Soul and bringing to man Love and Light and Happiness.
So you see there is no mystery of the Godhead, and no secret that
God does not wish man to know and understand, and no truth that
it is contrary to God's laws and will that man shall search for
and possess. It is said that God is Spirit, and it is true; but
spirit is not God, only one of his instruments used to work with
mankind and the spirits of men. To worship the instrument is blasphemy,
and only God alone must be worshiped. Jesus must not be worshiped
as God, the Holy Spirit must not be so worshiped, and the sooner
men learn this Truth and observe it the sooner they will get in
at-onement with the Father, and please the master, who, as some
may not know, is the greatest worshiper of the Father in all his
universe.
I have written longer than I expected, but I hope from my message
many mortals may receive the truth, and believe that the Holy Spirit
is not one of the Godhead, and that the mystery of the Godhead is
a myth, without body, soul or spirit, and that there is no truth
in all God's universe that man is not invited to search for and
understand and possess.
I will now stop and in doing so, will leave you my love and blessings,
and will pray the Father to send the Holy Spirit to you with great
abundance of the Divine Love. Good night and God bless you until
I come again.
Your brother in Christ,
Luke
*Comma Iohanneum
(1 John 5:7):
Robert Estienne, when editing his Bible, used the text of Erasmus
and the Complutensian Bible as basis. Both of the texts had the
Comma Johanneum. First, Erasmus didn't print it in his edition of
the Greek NT. But since the editors of the Complutensian Bible criticised
him on this point, he promised to insert the verses if one single
Greek manuscript could be found that contained the passage. The
manuscript shown to Erasmus appears now to be written in the beginning
of the 16th century. Erasmus kept his promise, and inserted the
passage (although he indicated in a footnote his suspicions about
the manuscript). Among the thousands of Greek manuscripts examined
since the time of Erasmus, only three others do contain the passage.
One is from the 12th century, another from the 16th century and
a third one from the 14th or 16th century. The oldest known citation
of the Comma is in a fourth-century Latin treatise entitled Liber
apologeticus (ch 4) attributed either to Priscillian or to his follower,
Bishop Instantius of Spain. The Comma probably originated as a piece
of allegorical exegesis of the three witnesses and may have been
written as a marginal gloss in a Latin manuscript of 1 John, whence
it was taken into the text of the Old Latin Bible during the fifth
century, while it's only in the 8th century that it inserted in
the Vulgata.. The passage does not appear in manuscripts of the
Latin Vulgate before about A.D. 800. But from Erasmus on, through
Stephanus, it made its way in the Textus Receptus.
(source : B.M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament. Its Transmission,
Corruption and Restoration, Oxford : Clarendon, 1968, 101-102)
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