NEUOFFENBARUNGDeutscher Text · Book contents
3 January 1844, evening
[Ste.01_008,01] Set down another passage of your choosing at once, and we shall see whether there is any light in it for our subject.
[Ste.01_008,02] ‘And He, Jesus, was about thirty years old when He began, being, as was supposed, a son of Joseph.’
[Ste.01_008,03] The passage is given, and with it a light of overpowering radiance! Truly, at first sight of this passage you yourselves should see to the ground of the matter that serves our purpose here. Yet we shall see whether, after a brief introduction, you can behold the light yourselves.
[Ste.01_008,04] He was about thirty years old when He took up His office as teacher, and He was supposed to be the bodily son of Joseph the carpenter.
[Ste.01_008,05] Who is this ‘He’? This ‘He’ is the Lord Himself, who was from eternity and will eternally be that very same Lord!
[Ste.01_008,06] But how was He about thirty years old, He who was eternal? Here the Eternal One created Himself as a human being for the first and the last time. As a human being He counted in Himself the time that had proceeded from Him from eternities.
[Ste.01_008,07] He was nearly thirty years old. What does this mean? Could He, as God, count thirty years? Surely not, for He was eternal. Only as a human being could He do that.
[Ste.01_008,08] He then took up His office as teacher. How? As God or as a human being? The addition ‘And He was supposed to be the bodily son of Joseph the carpenter’ sufficiently attests that the ‘He’ who was scarcely thirty took up His office as a human being alone. For God within Him stood in relation to the carpenter's son, scarcely thirty years old, as the inner spirit stands in relation to every human being. This spirit must first be awakened through corresponding outward action arising from love, before it comes forth acting as a being with power and activity of its own.
[Ste.01_008,09] Accordingly, this outward son of Joseph the carpenter, scarcely thirty years old, took up His office wholly as a human being and in no way as God. On particular occasions the Godhead came forth and acted within Him only to the extent that He, as a human being, brought it into activity within Himself through His deeds. Without deeds the Godhead did not emerge.
[Ste.01_008,10] How, then, could this human being, scarcely thirty years old, take up an office of teaching for which great learning is needed, presupposing much study and wide reading? Where did His wisdom come from?
[Ste.01_008,11] ‘For we know him. He is the carpenter's son and has worked at his father's trade before our eyes often enough. We know that he has never attended schools, and we can hardly recall his taking a book in hand and reading it when he had time and opportunity. Until practically this hour he was an ordinary tradesman, and look, he is now a teacher, and His teaching is full of unction and deep wisdom, though the carpenter shows through in everything else. How long can it be since he and his brothers built a donkey stall for us? Just look at his knotted carpenter's hands, and see, he is a teacher and even a prophet, without ever having so much as tasted the school of the Essene prophets. What are we to make of that?’
[Ste.01_008,12] See, that is a literally true testimony given to the carpenter's son at Capernaum! From this testimony it is plain that very little of the Godhead can have shown itself outwardly in this carpenter scarcely thirty years old. Otherwise he would have been deemed worthy of a different testimony.
[Ste.01_008,13] But where did this wholly pure human being acquire such capacity to teach, since he had neither studied nor read widely? He owed his capacity to teach solely to what he did.
[Ste.01_008,14] His action proceeded solely from his constant, great love of the Divine, and likewise from love of his neighbour. He offered every act to God and carried it out in such a way that he never had his own advantage in view, only that of his neighbour. Besides this he devoted three hours every day to resting wholly in God.
[Ste.01_008,15] In this way he increasingly awakened the Godhead slumbering in him in all its fullness and made it yield him a return in proportion to the measure and degree of his activity. When, as I said, he had scarcely reached the age of thirty, the Godhead in him had awakened to such a degree that, through its spirit of wisdom, he received the sublime capacity to take up the office of teaching to which, as you know, he was called.
[Ste.01_008,16] After this introduction I ask whether you do not now see the exceedingly bright light shining in this passage. Yes, you see it already and also see where it is leading. So we shall make the conclusion very brief, to avoid drawing the matter out needlessly.
[Ste.01_008,17] What, then, is the conclusion to be? See, very briefly: ‘Go and do likewise!’
[Ste.01_008,18] Do not think that you can awaken the divine spirit within you by much reading and study alone. In that way you are more likely to kill it and carry it to the tomb as a dead body. Be active according to the fundamental rule of life. Your spirit will then come alive and find within itself everything you surely would not have found by reading a thousand books!
[Ste.01_008,19] Once the spirit is alive, you may read too, and by reading or hearing My Word you will gather fruits with a living kernel or ground. Unless the spirit has been awakened beforehand, you reap only the empty husks of the fruit, in which there is no living kernel. The living kernel is the inward, living, spiritual understanding.
[Ste.01_008,20] But where should it come from if the spirit has not first been made free to act and alive? The body is an outward husk that falls away and decays. The soul is the spirit's nourishment and body. If you read merely to enrich your outward, natural knowledge, what is to reach the spirit, which is not yet active in life to the proper degree? It cannot at once meet each word you read with its living spiritual insight, fill the word read from outside as a husk with its own living kernel, and only thus make it living and effective.
[Ste.01_008,21] Hence the old principle always holds: be doers of the Word, not idle hearers. Only then will you become livingly aware within yourselves of what is divine in it!
[Ste.01_008,22] I think this too will be clear. But since, as I have said more than once, people never have enough light, let us proceed again to a central sun of your choosing.