NEUOFFENBARUNGDeutscher Text · Book contents
8 January 1844, evening
[Ste.01_010,01] You may choose another passage as before. Do so freely!
[Ste.01_010,02] ‘He came into His own, and His own did not receive Him.’ ‘Pilate answered, “What I have written, I have written!”’
[Ste.01_010,03] The passages are well and rightly chosen and, as you say, express the matter to a hair from the outset.
[Ste.01_010,04] Who came into His own, and His own did not receive Him? I hope you know who ‘He’ is. What is His own is humanity as it should be in the order I created, active in love towards one another and full of earnest love towards God their Creator.
[Ste.01_010,05] ‘But His own did not receive Him.’ His own are those whom He had from the beginning chiefly brought up for Himself. He had continually sent them teachers and prophets and led and guided them wonderfully.
[Ste.01_010,06] Why, then, did they not receive Him? Because He taught them the true ways of active love that lead to eternal life. But His own loved idleness, easy living, dominion and glory, and this does not accord with the teaching of humility and active love.
[Ste.01_010,07] They said, ‘We have Moses and the prophets, whom we read. What more do we need? What need have we of you, who dishonour the Sabbath and think little of Moses and the prophets by failing to keep their ordinances? Is it not enough that we read and study Scripture and write explanations of it a yard long? What other activity, more worthy of God, do you ask of us?
[Ste.01_010,08] Is God not a spirit whose being ought not to be pictured in any image? How could one honour and praise Him more worthily than by continually reading from beginning to end the word He spoke through Moses and the prophets, and explaining it to oneself and others, so that God may be understood ever more clearly in His will?
[Ste.01_010,09] What do you make yourself out to be? We have Abraham as our father, and have Moses and the prophets. Are you greater than these? What would you teach us that they did not?
[Ste.01_010,10] What is a human deed of love before God? It is only a vain thought. A person can do nothing, for all power to act dwells in God alone. So you are a false teacher, a false prophet, and one who stirs up the people!
[Ste.01_010,11] We have Scripture from Alpha to Omega in our heads. Is that not activity enough? Or should we fail to study Scripture and thereby make light of the holy gift the Lord God of hosts granted us through Moses and the prophets?
[Ste.01_010,12] You go against the divine will, yet pass yourself off as a teacher and prophet of God! Is it not written that every false prophet and sorcerer is to be punished by death by fire?
[Ste.01_010,13] This common carpenter's son, who can scarcely read or even write his own name, presumes to impose on us old scribes a teaching that runs directly contrary to the spirit of Moses!’
[Ste.01_010,14] See, these are many of the objections on account of which He who came into His own was not received by His own.
[Ste.01_010,15] Why? Because His own, as is also written, did not know Him!
[Ste.01_010,16] And why did they not know Him? Because they merely read and learnt by heart and were never doers of the Word of God.
[Ste.01_010,17] In the same way I still come continually into My own, yet My own will not receive Me and recognise that it is I!
[Ste.01_010,18] Why will they not? Because, even at best, they prefer reading and hearing, and gaping at My works, to one small act according to My Word. So the spirit in what is My own, the heart, does not come alive and does not know Me, because what is My own will not receive Me in living action.
[Ste.01_010,19] But I say that all these scribes will one day also say, ‘Lord, Lord! We prophesied, preached and taught in Your name out of Your Word!’
[Ste.01_010,20] But I shall say to them, ‘Depart from Me. I have never known you! Go to the one who hired you as teachers and sages, so that you may receive your wages! I came to you and knocked on the door of what is My own. But none of you said, “Come in and quicken our spirit, that we may become active and strong according to Your Word!” You were content with the treasures of your heads, but you left My barns in your hearts empty and forfeited all that is Mine within you. So cry “Lord, Lord!” now as much as you like. Still I cannot know you, for I know My own by what is Mine in them. You have nothing of Mine from Me within you, so I cannot know you.’
[Ste.01_010,21] Pilate too confessed Me in this way. He fastened the testimony of his confession above the one put to a shameful death, after he had had the Living One scourged and fastened to the cross. His confession stands written, above the head of the Crucified One, as a testimony to all who carry a confession of God in their heads and none in their hearts. On their foreheads it is indeed written, ‘JESUS NAZARENUS, REX JUDAEORUM’, and they insist upon this inscription, which says as much as ‘Lord, Lord!’ But in their hearts there is no inscription saying, ‘O Lord, be gracious and merciful to me, a poor sinner!’ ‘Our Father’ is in the head, but ‘Dear Father’ is absent from the heart.
[Ste.01_010,22] Pilate did insist upon his inscription and would put up no other, for he himself said, ‘What is written is written!’ But why did he not show the Living One the honour beforehand that he afterwards showed the dead?
[Ste.01_010,23] The reason is the same one for which all the learned prefer to remain with the arguments of their heads and the dead reverence that issues from them, instead of entering into even the least living deed of true love. They stand in twilight and believe, or rather think, ‘If there is something in the matter, we will not stand in its way by our confession. If there is nothing in it, we have lost nothing either way. For if one honours what is supposed to exist, one gains if it does exist and loses nothing if it does not.’
[Ste.01_010,24] Pilate thought likewise: ‘If the crucified man is a higher being, I have shown him honour. If he is not, I am also justified, for then my inscription serves as an official lampoon, from which anyone may see why this man was crucified here.’
[Ste.01_010,25] Do you think the first reason will count with Me when there is clear evidence of the second? I tell you, those who cry ‘Lord, Lord!’ to Me in this fashion will surely not be heard, known and received by Me. A confession of the head will bring no one a hair's breadth closer to eternal life. Whoever wishes to come to Me must first receive Me within through living love. His own love for Me will tell him that I am, and that I come to him and give him eternal life.
[Ste.01_010,26] No one can love what does not exist. He can, however, set up all sorts of phantoms in his head about what has no being, and put Me Myself among them. But I am not there. No one will ever find Me there or come to a living conviction of Me and of eternal life, for there I hang dead beneath Pilate's inscription!
[Ste.01_010,27] Only one who becomes a doer of My Word will find, at My tomb where he sought the dead, the Risen One and the eternally Living One, by the flame of his heart!
[Ste.01_010,28] I think this too should be clear. Even so, next time we shall go one central sun further.