NEUOFFENBARUNGDeutscher Text · Book contents
17 January 1844, evening
[Ste.01_017,01] ‘Did not Christ have to suffer these things and so enter into His glory?’
[Ste.01_017,02] In the passage set down above it is again perfectly evident that the glory of eternal life is attained solely by the deed of love, and never by wide reading and learning.
[Ste.01_017,03] Someone will of course say, ‘Christ already was eternal life itself and had all its glory within Himself. Why then did He afterwards have to suffer to enter into this glory?’
[Ste.01_017,04] But I say: Christ was only a human being and, as the first and fundamental example, had first to make the perfect glory of God wholly His own through His deeds. Had He not done this, the whole creation would have been lost. For only in Him did Father and Son become One again, or, what is the same thing, divine love and divine wisdom. For previously love had withdrawn from wisdom because wisdom, in its holiness, had set itself at an altogether unreachable height and placed its demands beyond all possibility of fulfilment.
[Ste.01_017,05] But wisdom was desolate without the innermost union with its love. How could it unite with love again? In the human being Jesus it had itself to fulfil the conditions of reconciliation it had imposed. It had to humble itself down to the least point, and only in this way did it become wholly One again with its love, which is the ‘Father’.
[Ste.01_017,06] Therefore Christ, Himself the eternal, almighty primal wisdom of the Father, disdained all the wisdom of the sages of the world. All the scribes had to be an abomination to Him if their deeds did not accord with the ground of life in Scripture.
[Ste.01_017,07] As the eternal wisdom of the Father He had to do works of love and teach people the sole law of love. Indeed, in the end He had to let Himself be taken captive and crucified by the wisdom of the learned priests. Thus as the primal, eternal light of the Father, or of love, He had to suffer the greatest disgrace and the greatest darkening in Himself. Hence He cried, ‘Father, why have You forsaken Me?’
[Ste.01_017,08] That He, as the primal, eternal light of all infinity, had to endure utter darkness within Himself is shown by the moment no one has yet understood: after Christ's death on the cross a complete darkening came over the whole of infinite creation, and the light of all the suns in the whole of infinity, including the earth's sun, went out for three hours!
[Ste.01_017,09] This moment of darkening was also the same in which, as you know, the soul of Christ descended into hell after death to redeem the spirits held captive in the old wisdom and lead them to the new light, which began to fill all infinity through the reunion of the Son with the Father.
[Ste.01_017,10] Christ therefore had to fulfil the old law of wisdom in Himself down to the last stroke, to atone before the face of the Father for all errors against it. In other words, all wisdom had to be crucified so that the Father's love might be justified.
[Ste.01_017,11] Now, that is what God Himself did. What, then, do you wish to do? Do you suppose that by justifying your wisdom you will enter into the glory of eternal life?
[Ste.01_017,12] If Christ, as divine wisdom itself, had to do works of love and preach them in the most living way, and had to crucify all His wisdom and let it pass into the deepest darkness so that He could re-enter fully into the glory of the Father, who was the separated love in Christ Himself, then people too will have to walk this way and follow Christ if they wish to enter with Him into the glory of His fatherly love.
[Ste.01_017,13] In the earliest church on earth it was said, ‘You human beings can reach divine wisdom, otherwise inaccessible, only through the love of God!’ But with Christ it is said, ‘Now I, as divine wisdom itself, as the way and the life, am the door to love, or to the Father. Whoever now wishes to come to the Father must enter through Me!’
[Ste.01_017,14] But how? Through wisdom, perhaps, because Christ as the door is divine wisdom itself? Oh no! For this very wisdom let itself be humbled to the last atom. As the inviolable holiness of God it descended deep below all sinners. The wisdom that formerly not even the most perfect angelic spirit was permitted to behold in its primal light now went among sinners and ate under their roofs, and in the end had to let pagan soldiers and executioners nail it to the cross!
[Ste.01_017,15] From this boundless humbling of divine wisdom itself it is clearer than sunlight that no one will attain the glory of eternal life with puffed-up wisdom. The books and writings a person has studied will not become steps into the kingdom of heaven. Only true humility and true, active, living love for the Father will do so.
[Ste.01_017,16] In Christ all primal divine wisdom passed into love for the Father. In this way Son and Father became One. It must be so with a human being too. Until a person is humbled down to the last drop in his proud understanding and all its desires, which run after all sorts of honours, until indeed he lays everything at the feet of love and thereby undergoes a brief darkening of all his worldly wisdom, he will truly not enter into the Father's glory.
[Ste.01_017,17] Christ had to suffer and do these things to enter into the Father's glory. So everyone must do likewise and follow Christ in a living way if they wish to enter into the Father's glory.
[Ste.01_017,18] Christ did not study at universities in order to enter into the Father's glory as a learned sage. His school was called humility and active love! If Christ led the way with this school, how do you wish to enter the kingdom of God with a different one?
[Ste.01_017,19] I think more on this would be needless, for it has been made as clear as sunlight from the deepest wisdom. So do likewise, and you will live! Amen.