1961 Maui Work

Tape 389 Side 1

Two Steps To Spiritual Freedom (Habakkuk 2:18-20)

By Joel Goldsmith

Part 3 of 4

So in order to be consistent, you must have only one God, one creator, and then that one without capacity for sin, or any evil condition.  That brings you, you see, to where you can readily accept The Infinite Way teaching of no power—non-power.  We don’t need a power over sin, disease or death because these have no existence in God.  And if they have no existence in God, they have no existence. Then they can only exist as beliefs in the human consciousness that believes in two powers . . . even believes that God has two powers:  the power to reward and the power to punish, the power to give and the power to withhold.

Do you see how you finitize God; how you limit God; how you make God a little bit of a thing when you make Him something that has the power to give us sunshine or withhold sunshine?  To give Him the power to give us crops or withhold crops?

You see, you make God really into some kind of a man—just a man with a little more power.  But God isn’t that way.  God can’t give sunshine and God can’t withhold sunshine.  God can’t give us purity and God can’t give us the capacity to sin.  God can’t give us life and God can’t give us death.  God is eternal life, and that His life is the life of our being.  He doesn’t give it, He is it.  He doesn’t give it, He is it.

God does not give us purity; God is our soul and the soul of God being pure, our soul is pure.  God doesn’t give us wisdom—God iswisdom, but being infinite, God is our wisdom.  There is no giving and there is no withholding.  There is only “ising.”  If there were a God life and your life, ah, God-life may be immortal and yours might be mortal.  But if God is infinite, God is infinite life, and that means your life and my life.

So you see, in order to free your selves of the limitations of human sense you must understand the nature of God.  To know Him aright is life eternal.  And you’ll find that this true, that as you begin to know God as complete pure being without any capacity to wipe out a nation, or punish the sinners—a God that cannot visit disease on innocent people or guilty people; a God that cannot even permit conditions of disease or sin or war or poverty—once you have that kind of a God, you have freed yourself because the foundation for evil in your life is the belief that in some way God is the cause of it, the author of it, the creator of it, the maintainer of it.

Know God aright, and you will have a God that you could love with all your heart, and with all your soul because you can look out on this world and witness its injustices, its sins, its disasters and say, “Thank God there’s no God in those.”  And when you have removed God from them, you’ve removed the substance from them and they begin to destroy themselves.  They begin to dissolve.

The world must awaken; it must awaken to the realization of God in order to remove the foundation of evil from our lives.  They tried to even make believe that wars are righteous, and that God is on one side or another—God on the side of people out killing.  God on the side of people slaughtering innocent men, women, and children.  You know God is not in war.  God is not in the whirlwind.  God is not in the storm—God is in the still small voice.  God is never in any form of force—not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit—and, therefore, there is no evil where My spirit is or My spirit is there is liberty.

So it is then that you come to facing your fears, and when you face them, you will find that you are fearing person, thing, or condition, and very often you’ll find also in your worshiping that you’re really worshiping person, or thing, or condition, as we have it here in Habakkuk, third chapter (Ed. Note:  second chapter), 18th to 20th verse:

“What profiteth the graven image that the maker thereof hath graven it, the molten image and a teacher of lies that the maker of his work trusteth therein to make dumb idols?  Woe unto him that sayeth to the wood, awake, to the dumb stone, Arise, it shall teach!  Behold.  It is laid over with gold and silver and there is no breath at all in the midst of it.  But the Lord is in his holy Temple.  Let all the earth keep silence before him.”

So you will find that your hopes and your fears are in person or things.  It might be gold; it might be silver; it might be land; it might be securities; it might be Social Security.  But hope and ambition and faith and confidence is always in something external, and there is our idolatry.  All of which disappears when you understand that the nature of God is the nature of your individual being.  And, therefore, you have no need of person, thing, circumstance for you embody your good.  Son, thou art ever with me and all that I have is thine.  All that I have . . . don’t worry, what somebody else has—all that I have is thine.

Then realizing that God is your very own being, how can you fear or love or hate gold or silver or germs or poisons or bullets or bombs?  How can you fear that God  . . . God’s being, can be destroyed?  And God’s being is the essence, substance of my being.  I may be the tumbler, the form, but God is the essence and substance, even of my body.

        I shall not fear what mortal man can do to me.  I shall not fear what mortal circumstance or condition can do to me.  Why?  Because God is the essence of my being and in Him there is no darkness.  Therefore, in that of which I am formed, there is no capacity for negative in any form, of any nature.

But if I do not know the nature of God this way, how can I know the nature of my perfect self?  If I do not credit God with being pure, how then can I say I am the showing forth of God, therefore, I am pure?  For I cannot be any more pure than my source, my essence, my substance.

Watch this simple principle when you are witnessing evil in any form—in your own experience or in the world or your neighbor’s—smile within yourself and realize, “There’s no God in this.  This never had its rise in God.  It has no God-substance, no God-law, no God-life, no God‑being—it is the arm of flesh,” and then let it dissolve itself and disappear from sight.

Remove from it that which belief gives it life, and that is the belief that it comes of God, emanates from God, God is responsible for it.  But withdraw that.  Be able to look at any situation and say there is no God in it, no power to sustain it, no spiritual power, no law of God to sustain it.  Oh, but there is no power but God; ah, then it must dissolve and disappear.

End Part 3