new church life: jan uary/february 2015
father, begins to clothe itself with a body drawn from the materials of the
mother. This body is not only the physical body, but also has some of our
inclinations and characteristics. These include not only our human strengths
but also our weaknesses, which have the potential of drawing us down to hell.
When a baby is born, he or she is a combination of characteristics of both
parents, including their good and bad qualities. But on a higher level the soul,
which gives us the ability to receive life from the Lord, remains intact. It is
above our consciousness; nothing we can do will ever affect it. Mostly our lives
are lived out in the world of the body.
But in the Lord’s case, His soul came from Jehovah Himself. It was a divine
soul that clothed itself with a body from Mary during her pregnancy. As with
us, the Lord took from Mary not only the natural things of His physical body,
but also her characteristics and inclinations, including her human weakness
and inclination toward evil. He was exactly the same as we are. The difference,
however, was that the Lord’s soul, because it was divine, could penetrate into
His conscious mind and make its presence felt there.
In the story of Abram, each time Jehovah speaks to him, it is a picture
of the Lord’s Divine Soul making its presence known and felt in the Lord’s
conscious human mind. This is what is happening in the story of Jehovah
calling Abram to leave his country, family and father’s house.
We don’t know exactly when this took place in the Lord, but we do know
that He was very young. The call of Abram is described as the Lord’s first
awareness of the Divine within Himself. In all likelihood He was still an infant
and had no clear understanding of the relationship between His Divine Soul
and human body. But what He did know was that there were certain states
in that body that He had to leave behind if He was to grow up to fulfill His
mission on earth.
These things are described in Abram leaving behind his country, family
and father’s house. Abram was called upon to make a leap of faith to change
his state. Babies and little children tend to focus primarily on their bodies: they
are hungry, hot or cold, wet or dry. They don’t like to be left alone and love
being picked up and held. Buried deeply within all this, and still inactive, are
the potential states of human evil that will eventually reveal themselves to us
so that we can fight against them and remove them.
In the case of the Lord, He became aware of these weak human states at a
very early age, and recognized that He would have to put them aside so that He
could come into new states of love and wisdom which would be given to Him
by Jehovah as He grew. Thus He would have to leave His father’s house and go
to a land that He would be shown.
So the story of Christmas, as an event in the past, reminds us not only of
the Lord’s birth in the world, but also of the beginning of His lifelong process
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