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Chapter Three of Religion for Awakening: Creation (b) The Work of God the Son

Awakening at sunrise to meditate

The Holy Spirit does not work alone upon the creation of the System. She works in close collaboration with the Second Person of the Trinity, who in Christianity is known as God the Son. However, in relation to creation, the Holy Spirit is Mother and the Son is for all practical purposes the Father. Together they comprise the Creative Godhead. Just as the Holy Spirit may be described as God stretching down an arm to do the work of creation and to give life and organization to the universe, so God the Son represents the Wisdom-Love of God coming into the creation. Wisdom may be said to consist of knowledge and love combined, and therefore to speak of Wisdom-Love may be rather redundant. If wisdom is itself a combination of love and knowledge, then, strictly speaking, it is not necessary to speak of wisdom and love, joined by a hyphen, as the special characteristic of God the Son. But it is so important to remember that the love of God is manifested by and expressed through God the Son, and the word Wisdom by itself is so often thought of as being just knowledge and nothing more, that it will better express what we mean if we speak of Wisdom-Love than if we were to use the word Wisdom alone. Wisdom-Love, then, is the force or quality of God which God the Son brings to work upon the creation and evolution of the Solar System.

There is no special organ in the human body for the expression of Wisdom-Love in the same way that the arm is the special organ of activity and energy. We must, therefore, imagine God the Son as Wisdom-Love without an organ to represent Him. His work is mainly twofold: The first main work of the Son is to gather together the living matter at every level into forms and to hold the forms together. This is the work of love. Love is found everywhere in the Universe; it is at work in every atom; it is to be found in the centripetal force which draws and holds atoms together, making molecules, compounds, and, indeed, all the forms of life that we know–rocks and stones, trees and plants, and the bodies of animals, birds, creeping things and human beings, as well as the greater bodies, such as suns and planets and their satellites. Love is at work also, where we more easily recognize it, in that personal attraction which draws and holds human beings one to another, and, to a less extent, animals to each other and to their human friends. Whether unconscious, conscious, or self-conscious, the force that draws and holds different objects or persons together is the force of Love, and it is that force which the Second Person of the Trinity brings to bear upon creation and evolution.

Another Aspect

The second main work of the Son is to distribute fragments of Himself into these forms, and to develop consciousness in them. These fragments are the spirits which inform the lives of all beings, human, sub-human and super-human, and so make them conscious. Thus God the Son sacrifices Himself continually, so that from Himself other beings may come into existence. This is the eternal sacrifice of the Son of God symbolized in the Christian religion by the death of the Son of God on the cross. His death is His burial or immersion of Himself deeper and deeper in matter, in the rock and the tree, as well as in the human being and the angel. He dies that we may live, and He continues to die until all those fragments of Himself, which have come forth into these lower worlds, shall have re-ascended to oneness with Him as self-conscious beings, quite perfect, completely one with each other and with Him, and yet quite distinct from one another. So by His death on the cross of matter we have life, and by His death we are saved or redeemed from our bondage to the lower nature. Thus God the Son ceaselessly pours forth His love, and by His wisdom He “mightily and sweetly” orders all things. This point is naturally difficult to understand, because our brains are not accustomed to thinking of such matters, but the more we think of it the clearer it will become.

It must be understood that this work described here as twofold for the sake of clearness is really one and the same work. The Son of God holds the forms together and pours into the forms fragments of Himself which are the spirits within the forms, but He does the two simultaneously, so that it is the fragments of Himself, the spirits within, that hold the forms together. When the spirit leaves any form, then that form ceases to be a center of consciousness, dies and immediately begins to disintegrate. If it is a very large form, such as a planet, it takes ages to disintegrate. If it is a comparatively small form, such as a plant or the body of an animal or human being, it disintegrates in a few days or weeks or even hours. The body or form dies, but the spirit cannot die, and when the spirit withdraws from one form it clothes itself sooner or later in another, and so spiritual evolution proceeds side by side with material evolution. As the spirit within develops its powers, it clothes itself in better and more efficient forms of its own kind.

Divine Cooperation

Such is the work of God the Son in creative evolution, and such is the way in which at this stage He and the Holy Spirit work together. The Holy Spirit is the Life-giver, giving life to all matter. The Son is the Love-giver and the Consciousness-giver, holding together forms and bodies made of living matter so long as He needs them for the evolution of spirits within those forms, which spirits are fragments of His own being. This truth is symbolized in the Christian religion by the virgin birth of Christ the Son of God. The matter is the virgin mother; the Holy Spirit descends upon the matter and gives to it life; and the offspring of this union of the Holy Spirit and the virgin matter is the Son of God, who is the love-principle and the center of consciousness at the heart of every living form. Thus the Son of God is born into our world “of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary.” You who read this are, in your inmost heart, He, and so is every one around you.

The Son and the Holy Spirit together keep the whole Solar System alive and in motion. If They were to withdraw from the System, the whole System would fall to pieces; there would be nothing but a vast sea of lifeless matter or a conglomeration of bubbles of ether, as it was in the beginning of creation. And this is true of the planet earth and of the Solar System as a whole, of the way that these are formed and kept living, and of the way that millions upon millions of seemingly separate lives or centers of consciousness, such as ourselves, come to exist in the universe, to evolve to God-like perfection and become one again with the Son of God, Whose fragments they are, and is equally true of all the other millions of suns and their planets in this unthinkably vast Universe of which our Solar System is but as a single atom.

More On The Trinity

A little more must be said at this point about the Persons of the Trinity, because that is a fundamental truth taught not only by the Christian religion, but by practically every great world religion, and recognized as an essential basis of thought by many philosophers. The word “Person” is a very difficult word to understand and to explain, especially when it is used of the different aspects or functions of the Deity. Etymologically it is derived from the Latin word persona, which means the mask which an actor wore to give him the appearance of some other character whom he represented in a play. But that does not help us much, because the word very soon lost that original meaning, and came to be used to designate any character in real life or in fiction. So it came to be used to describe that which distinguishes one character from another, that which gives to a man or woman his or her distinctive character. It is in this sense that the word is generally used now.

When we speak of a person we mean a man or woman who is a rational being with his or her own special characteristics. But when we speak of the Persons in the Godhead, we do not mean that they are like human persons. They are that, but very, very much more than that. We mean rather to distinguish them from mere functions or from mechanical forces. When we speak of God as personal we do not intend thereby to reduce Him to the level of a human person, but to exalt Him far above the level of forces, such as the wind or electricity, which is the level to which many people would reduce Him when they refuse to think of Him as personal. It would be untrue to think of God as a big human being, but even that would be better than to think of Him as a big machine.

What, then, we mean when we speak of God as a Person is that, however inconceivably greater than a human being He is, He is at least as much a person as the greatest of human beings; that is to say, that He has a will and intelligence and that He loves. And when we speak of the three Persons in the Trinity we mean exactly the same of each of Them, namely, that They, although They exercise force, are not just forces or functions. Rather, They are eternal distinctions within the Godhead, each One of whom may be thought of as a Person exercising a distinctive function. They are not three Gods, but, as it were, one Threefold God. In these pages we are thinking of the God of all creation as One God in Three Persons, the inconceivable Trinity of Persons in the Absolute One.

Once more, then, we will try to summarize the work or function of these Persons in the creation and evolution of our Solar System and all that is in it. God the Father plans the System in His mind, and He wills it. He is the Great Architect of the System. From the moment that He wills it, it begins; and so long as He wills it, it exists and will exist. God the Son pours forth His love, and by so doing He sacrifices Himself to the extent that fragments of His very being are sent into the system to hold together and inhabit forms of life made of matter of varying degrees of density to which the Holy Spirit has already given life. And the Holy Spirit, at the same time that She continually gives life to all matter, directs and organizes the evolution of life and form at every level. The Father is the Willer and Ruler; the Son is the Lover and Sacrificer; the Holy Spirit is the Life-giver and Organizer. And these Three are eternally One.

Read Chapter Four of Religion for Awakening: The Purpose of Creation

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Chapters in Religion for Awakening:

Introduction to Religion for Awakening

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