____________________________________________________________ 互户互户互猾せカせЙせカせЙせカせЙせカせЙせカ  *** The Little Worker *** ____________________________________________________________ 互户互户互猾せカせЙせカせЙせカせЙせカせЙせカ  Published by CDTTT-The Committee for the Difussion of The Third Testament Issue of May 2003 _________________________ TABLE OF CONTENTS: - True Faith - Is God a Person? - The Absolute Truth - Final Word ____________________________________________________________ 互户互户互猾せカせЙせカせЙせカせЙせカせЙせカ  - True Faith Faith, as you know, is a virtue of the spirit. And a virtue, as you also know, is a quality that defines something. For example, the virtue of fire is heat as the virtue of ice is to be cold. Virtues then, are all the attributes that define our spiritual being, our true nature. And among them, faith is the one that gives our spirit the faculty to "see", the quality of obtaining a real perception of things in a way that the physical senses and mind could not possible grasp, thus granting confidence to our spirit. Many understand faith as a strong hope, but while hope -another spiritual virtue- is a strong desire for something to take place, faith goes far beyond the desire because in order to be called faith, certainty must be involved. In other words, faith is the confidence that emanates from certainty, from knowledge. If we keep this in mind, then we can understand the words of Jesus: "...for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you." Matthew 17:20 You see, if one has a certainty, based not in desire or in sheer hope but in truth, faith performs prodigies. "The true faith is that gaze which contemplates what neither the mind nor the senses are able to discover. Only the faith is able to discover for man some of the mysteries of Creation." T153:57 Faith allows us to contemplate that which our eyes cannnot. Remember Thomas? His rationalism, when facing the unexpected, blinded him so he just could not realize that, as promised, Jesus had really resurrected. "Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." John 20:29 Believing without seeing? Curiosly enough, the Greek word "pistesaunte" used in the original Greek text of John's gospel, translated into English as "believed", when in reality means "comprehended" or "encompassed", is very similar to the colloquial expression "finally you've got the point". The same term, "Pisteusante", was used also by Paul, as reads in this note: "Pisteusante is a 'coincident aorist' participle as in Eph 1:13. It gives expression to one thing being logically consequent upon another rather than following on (some time) after the other." As we discussed before in our previous newsletter, literalism is not exactly the best way to translate texts from one language to another as you very well know... and 90% of the Bibles used nowadays in most languages, are translated not from the original texts, but from a translation to Latin taken made from some copies of the original texts -copies, since nobody knows where the originals are- ; of course, each Bible version claims to be the exact and correct translation, disregarding the others as being wrong. Regarding the English language bibles, I do not want to be driven into the middle of the heated and extremely emotional debate between KJV-only advocates and their opponents. Instead, I propose for you to read, study and analyze carefully the following paragraphs from the Third Testament's Book of The True Life: "It is indispensable to have faith, so as not to be detained along the way, nor feel fear before the ordeals. Faith is like a beacon that illuminates your way until you arrive at the safe haven of eternity. It cannot be faith of those lukewarm and timid spirits who today take one step forward and tomorrow go backwards; who do not want to struggle with their own affliction, trusting in the triumph of the spirit solely by the charity of the Father. Faith is that which is felt by the spirit who, knowing that God is within him, loves his Lord and rejoices, feeling Him within, and loving his brethren; that faith in the justice of the Father is so great, that he does not expect his fellowmen to love him; that he forgives offenses and errors, and that tomorrow he will be filled with light, because with his merits he attained his purification. He who has faith, has peace; he possesses love which comprises goodness." T263:11-15 "I reprimand those who preach a blind faith, a faith without knowledge, a faith acquired through fear and superstitions." T290:16 ____________________________________________________________ 互户互户互猾せカせЙせカせЙせカせЙせカせЙせカ  - Is God a person? You have probably heard someone saying that God is a person, since as we are normally surrounded by persons, we quickly tend to think that everyone and everything falls into that concept. This, of course, is something implanted since early childhood in most of us. I even read articles from very educated and articulated writers that use the expression "the human person", and I am still waiting to meet one person that it is not human... of course, I do not live in Toontown or Disney Studios where I think is more likely to get acquainted with animals and things that act, behave and talk as persons. Following this trend, it is only natural that, by default, many people actually think of God as if He were a person. Some religions, for example, teach that the Trinity consists of three persons and one only God. But is it true? Starting from the very word "person", which comes from Latin origin and has to do with theatrical perfomances, we must then go deep in our analysis so we can reach at where the truth is. In the Oxford Dictionary this explanation is given: `Person. (Latin=persona) a mask used by a player, a character acted; in later use, a human being; connected by some with the Latin personare "to sound through". A part played in a drama, or in life; hence, function, office, capacity; guise, semblance; character in a play or story'. As you probably know, in ancient Greece and Rome, same as in other cultures as the Chinese and Japanese, theatrical roles were played by men, even when the character to be represented was that of a woman. Hence, masks where required to achieve the illusion, both in voice and face. But added to this, there is a problem when you look in the Bible and find out that many times the word "person" was used when referring to different kinds of beings, although in the original text nothing has to do with the word person as we understand it now. So, we discover that KVJ translates to "person" the Hebrew word adam='man', a gender (Jonah 4:11); ish='man', a male (2 Kings 10:7); enosh='mortal' (Judges 9:4); methim='men' (Psa. 26:4); nephesh='soul' (Gen. 14:21); nephesh adam='soul of man' (gender) (Num. 31:35). There is no way that any of these terms can be properly used as God. The only other word employed in the Hebrew that was translated as "person", is panim='face'. Eighteen of the twenty occurrences of panim which are translated "person" employ it in the phrase "regard" or "accept persons", and it is evident that the term here does not relate so much to an individual, but as of a status of material possesions, whether such be 'high' or 'low', 'rich' or 'poor'. In clear opposition to the notion that God could be a person, the Divine Master Himself declares: "God [is] a Spirit: and they that worship Him must worship [Him] in spirit and in truth." John 4:24 Furthermore, in His revelations of this Third Era, the Lord explains to us: "This is the time for comprehension, of the illumination of the spirit and the mind, when man will finally seek Me spiritually, because he will acknowledge that God is not a person nor an image, but the Universal Spirit, unlimited and absolute." T295:29 ____________________________________________________________ 互户互户互猾せカせЙせカせЙせカせЙせカせЙせカ  -The Absolute Truth The discovery of the Theory of Relativity is, in my humble opinion, one of the peaks of human abstract science. But, it is not uncommon to find many people that take the findings of Einstein very lightly and while trying to use them for their own purposes, put them totally out of context. He liked to explain relativity with this simple anecdote: Suppose you have two cameras, one lift -or elevator, as said in America-, and one gun with one bullet. Suppose that you put the machine in action, traveling from one floor to the upper one, while one camera fixed in the machine's interior and the other camera fixed in the middle of both floors, are rolling when the gun is shot pointed right to the top of the machine, making the bullet cross from one side to the other. What would the result of the filming of both cameras be? Many can assume that since they were filming the same event, both films will be very similar. Not at all. The camera inside the elevator will show that the bullet, traced a curve trajectory, an hiperbola-like movement clearly represented in the film, entering from the top and going out some inches lower -depending on speed-. And the camera sitting still at the outside of the lift, will undisputedly show that the trajectory was... a straight line, crossing the machine from the same point from one side to the other. Yes? Two quite different and somewhat opposed points of view, each one of them with facts and proofs to support them. Both scientifically proven. This is relativity. That's for sure. By the way, so much for the scientific method, so dear to our scientific institute. But, where is the truth? Is it in the middle of both arguments? Many will agree with this, but no; if you compromise, the only thing you would do is to distort the partial truth that each version tries to demonstrate in such a way that both will become a lie. Partial truth you said? Aha! So, there is the clue. If we sum both versions, we probably will end closer to the truth than taking just one of the versions alone. In order to have the whole truth, then we must have infinite numbers of cameras filming the same event from every possible angle. Then, only then, we can get the whole picture, the whole truth. Who can do this? Who can see things from every possible angle? I guess that by now you may know this simple answer. You may ask: What does something as material as Relativity, have to do with the spiritual? Well, a lot, if you have the patience to follow me on this. To begin with: How many times have you been involved in a discussion with someone that, passionately, states that there is not an absolute on anything? How many times have you listened to somebody say "There is not such thing as an absolute truth?" And, wham! at that very moment and all of the sudden, Einstein's proposals are thrown in the arena of the discussion. Every time that I have someone tell me: "Hey, stupid, there is not such thing as an absolute truth!" I just put my Forrest-Gumpy face and ask them: "Not even this one?" Because if that assertion was to bue true all the time, then at least there is an absolute truth: that one! Jokes aside, probably what most of these good folks are really trying to say is that no one possesses the absolute truth... and I agree with them. No one can posses the truth, simply because God is the truth. Can we posses God? Nooooo. Can we be possesed by God? This is entirely up to us... and yep, it is quite possible. So, again, is there an absolute truth? Let's see: "Today, each man believes that he knows the truth in all its fullness; each religion claims to be the possessor of the truth. "I say to you that no one knows the absolute truth, since man has not succeeded in embracing, with his mind, even that part that has been revealed to him. "All men carry, within themselves, part of the truth, along with errors that they mix with the light of the truth." T322:15,16 "After a lot of traveling, mankind still remains divided spiritually. Is it because a different truth has been given to the people? No, there is only one truth. "The spiritual division of mankind is because some followed one branch of knowledge and others another. There is but one single tree that exists; and, on the other hand, its branches are many, but mankind has not wanted to understand My teachings in that manner, and the discussions separate and deepen their differences. "Each one believes he possesses the truth; each one feels he is in the right. However, I say to you, that as long as you taste only the fruit of one branch and reject that of the others, you will not be able to recognize that all fruits originate from the Divine tree, which, as a whole, forms the absolute truth." T129:35.36 "No man possesses the absolute truth nor is it contained in any book. That divine clarity, the omnipotent power; that infinite love, the absolute wisdom; that perfect justice, is in God. He is the only truth." T283:24 So, next time someone challenges your belief in the absolute truth, you might have something new to share with her or him. ____________________________________________________________ 互户互户互猾せカせЙせカせЙせカせЙせカせЙせカ  -Final Word: Beloved, I remind you that we have a humble and little forum where you can express your ideas, as well as share your analysis and spiritual findings. It is located at http://144000.net/lighthouse/ And also, if you haven't done it yet, you can register as a volunteer in the Spiritual Corps of Workers at http://144000.net/cuerpo/ Your Brother in the Lord The Little Worker **** PAST ISSUES AT http://144000.net/newsletter/ ****