THE GOD I KNOW Chapter Five

THE CONFLICT: DIVINE versus CARNAL

Even though Adam and Eve forgot their divine natures when they fell into mortality, God did not forget their divine natures. In fact, the God I know always and only sees us as divine. They see us as the beautiful, perfect individuals They created. Of course They recognize that we are living in a fallen state and that the reality of our existence is one of total opposition, but They see our carnal natures (the people we have become through heredity and environment) as part of the fallen world, not as part of us. They are aware of each of us as two separate people, the carnal and the divine; but in Their dealings with us, no matter how badly we behave, They continue to believe in the divine. Even though
our relationship with God is primarily carnal until we become aware of our own divinity, God’s relationship with us is always divine.

If we in our carnal weakness commit a sin, we may feel guilty and unworthy to ask God for anything, because we fear that God must surely be angry with us for sinning. The opposite is true. Rather than anger, God feels concern and empathy. They know that the reason for our sin is the curse of our carnality. They know we will sooner or later suffer painful consequences as a result of sinning, and They want to provide help, not punishment. They want to reinforce our divine self-image, so we will choose to let that be the reality which governs our behavior.

God understood all this in the planning stage of the world’s creation. They foresaw that we would need a way to transcend the evil inherent in mortality. They provided a Savior to fill that need. As has already been pointed out, Jesus Christ’s innate nature is to love, and His chosen purpose is to save us from evil. He is One with our Heavenly parents in that purpose – so much One that Christ can be included in the royal pronoun “They.”

In the beginning God the Father-Mother gave God the Son power over Satan in order to save God the Holy Ghost, and include us in Their Oneness.

Christ loves us so much that He voluntarily lived in mortality Himself, so that He could relate to our carnal feelings. He, by the power of His godliness, overcame the world. His suffering in Gethsemane was the passion of loving us so much that He felt the pain we feel when we sin. He died on the cross to cover those sins for us, so that we could be free from the pain of our own carnality if we accept His sacrifice. When we sin, God and Christ, instead of seeing our carnal nature which committed the crime, see our divine nature which is innocent of any crime. If we will let Him, if we will repent and turn to Him with knowledge that what we have done is against our divine desire, Christ can heal us from our guilt by letting us see ourselves at that moment as God sees us – free from sin, cleansed by His blood. He loves us that much. We worry about God forgiving us, when in truth God has not ever seen us as evil. God knows that what we need is to forgive ourselves. They know that nothing except the awareness of Their love can create in us that perfect peace which allows our divine nature to forgive our carnal nature. God wants us to feel that love. They are constantly pouring it out to us, hoping we will receive it.

While our reality in God’s eyes is our divine nature, we have to face the fact that our carnal natures are our own reality and Satan’s reality. Satan cannot see our divine natures. Everything he has to do with us relates only to our fallen natures, and so while most of the things he says are “true” in the sense of being the facts of the world we live in, they are opposite to God’s truth. Our carnal natures would do evil things. Our divine natures would not. Satan tries to reconcile us with our wickedness. God wants to assist us in believing in our own goodness. We are in the middle making the choices. We do have the free agency to decide whether we will be carnal or divine.

Unconditional Love and Free Agency

The God I know always loves us with unconditional love. That means that Their love is not dependent upon our behavior, but is an invariable constant. God is perfect. Their love is perfect. It is Their nature to love us and They are unchangeable in that nature. Nothing we can do, either good or bad, has any power to change God or to change the fact that the love They feel for each of us is a reality for Them. It is not always a reality for us because we do not always feel it. If it is our true desire to feel the love of God, we will be drawn by Them into the knowledge of the laws They live by, and into a renewing of our divine natures, so that it is possible for us to abide those laws.

The one law which God abides, and which we also abide because it is a fact of our existence, is the law of free agency. We do have to assume the responsibility of being free agents. That means that to be able to blame anyone except ourselves for the choices we make is a temporary comfort. Sooner or later the law of free agency demands that we acknowledge our own responsibility in the choosing of what we do, what we think, what we desire, who we become. Free agency requires that we decide which laws we will be obedient to, the carnal or the divine.

In mortality we were born into and do live in the presence of opposition under a carnal law, and it is our fallen nature to be obedient to laws which are contrary to God’s nature. These laws are sometimes called “survival instincts.” We are motivated to obey them by selfishness rather than by love. For this reason “natural (or fallen) man is an enemy to God.” Natural men are enemies to each other too. If we want to be friends with God and with each other, we have to be willing to live by the laws which are in harmony with God’s nature and with our own divine natures.

Because God knows we are facing opposition in the world, They especially want us to feel Their sustaining love and protection, and They try to give us the kind of help we need in every situation. As soon as mankind fell to the place where we were not in God’s presence and so could not always feel Their love, God came to our aid by offering us some concrete information about how we could feel Their love if we choose to. They gave us Heaven’s laws.

God does not require that we be obedient to these laws, but the law of free agency requires that we be obedient to our own eternal intelligence, our own “will.” If we go through the motions of being obedient to God against our own will, we are breaking the law of free agency and turning ourselves over to the manipulation of forces outside ourselves. The law God abides does not allow Them to manipulate us. It allows Them to open, when we knock of our own free will; to answer, when we ask of our own free will; and to help us find the good things which we of our own free will are seeking. The rules by which Satan functions are opposite to this. He is very anxious to manipulate us away from our true desires of heart and to force us to conform to his desires. It is his desire and function to corrupt God’s laws of love. When men believe Satan’s perversions, they
become the instruments of fighting against God.

How We Lost the True God

It is men, under the influential opposition of Satan, who have imposed on God negative attributes which make us fear “Him.” It is fallen man who has turned God’s offerings of truth and love into rigid laws with strict penalties. Ever since the fall of Adam, God’s communications to mankind have been added upon, taken away from, perverted and changed by the lies of Satan and the “wisdom of men,” until they are almost unrecognizable as far as what God really would say, and almost unusable because of the glaring contradictions. The people who are responsible for confusing us about the Word of God are often the so-called “believers” – the zealous church leaders, who demand to be able to measure our righteousness in order to be able to make a compensatory judgment of our wickedness. They take the beautiful, freeing, comforting gift of love offered by God – the spirit of the law – and break it up into separate little rigid cubicles of fear – the letter of the law. So in addition to facing the built-in opposition imposed by the carnal law, mankind is faced with the necessity of separating the truth of God’s divine laws from the world’s less-than-truth interpretations of them. Until we do this, we will either remain blind to the contradictions in what is called God’s law, and will worship a being who is less than God; or we will see the contradictions and be unable to worship at all a God of such confusion.

All the information God has offered us is perfect truth. When seen from God’s infinite perspective there are no contradictions in that truth. All of it fits harmoniously into God’s whole vast picture. Fallen man, with his very limited vision, had taken the eternal truths of the God I know and altered them to fit into the tiny little picture of his own fallen world.

To start with, man has changed the definitions of God’s words. For example, God’s definition of the word commandment would be “loving counsel which is in harmony with ultimate truth.: Man’s definition of commandment – “an authoritative order” – implies force, and immediately gives a false image of God. It makes God appear to be demanding and vindictive, which qualities are completely our of character for Them. It makes us feel forced into obedience or else condemned by guilt – both miserable options. God would not do that to us.

God wants us to be free. They have offered us Their Truth, ultimate truth, with no motivation except pure love, with no desire except to help us, with no strings attached. We are free to accept it or reject it. But we are not free to change it. Whenever we change it, dilute it, pervert it, corrupt it, misinterpret it, or otherwise misunderstand it, we limit our freedom and our power, by believing God to be less than They are.

Everything we believe which limits our free agency and which prevents us from seeing God clearly, also limits our ability to see our own divine natures and to be better, happier people.