In this Class we have opened the theme of the Magic of Creation. We have noted the four forces and something of the cycles of outworking wherein each of the four forces is dominant in its turn. All four always work together insofar as we are concerned on earth but each is dominant in its turn; and if you try to make one dominant when the other ought to be, it will not work. Man defeats himself so often because he does not recognize the basic principles of the creative action. It is only as we carry it forward in its proper sequence, proper steps, that we can experience the true pattern of fulfilment. Today I would like to emphasize a point which I touched upon briefly, I believe, and that is that on the fifth day we have again the beginning of the cycle, and we see that on the fifth day the emphasis is upon water. Let us note:
“And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.”
There are several points to be noted here of particular importance to us at the moment, one of course, that on the fifth day we again have the dominance of the water cycle. But let us note what it is that is brought forth by the waters: the fish of the sea, that which is to function in the water itself; and the fowl, that which is to fly in the firmament above the earth, the firmament or the atmosphere. Now we remember that air symbolizes spirit, and the creature that was to move in the air of the spirit was brought forth out of the water. I suppose you are all aware of the fact that there is a definite difference between fish and fowl and what we classify in the animal kingdom, because while an animal will decay, a bird or a fish will evaporate, if they are left dead. The dead animal form will decay but a bird or a fish evaporates. Now what is it that is brought forth by water, or truth, that is supposed to be able to function in the air of the spirit? Birds are used Biblically as symbols of thought. There are the destructive birds and the constructive birds, symbolizing thought or the nature of thought. Thought is supposed to be able to reach into or fly in the air of the spirit; but it is brought forth out of the water, out of truth. We need to see that there are those things that function in truth, and you take them out of truth—that is, the basic pattern—and they cannot function; the fish will suffocate in the air. So we need to begin to realize that out of truth there are those things which are brought forth in the experience of our own lives which are supposed to function in one of these two elements: water and air; truth, as such, and the air of the spirit.
Then we note that the next step is air. We remember the establishing of the firmament, dividing the waters that are above and the waters that are below, etc. And on the sixth day, the Lord said, or God said, “Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth,” etc. The third step is earth, but the second step in the cycle is air. While these creatures, including the body of man itself, are brought forth on the sixth day out of the earth, what is the primary characteristic of the land animal or of man? The air he breathes. And it is said with respect to man, “And God breathed the breath of life into man's nostrils, and man became a living soul.” The breath we breathe, the necessity of breathing air—and it is the air in relationship to earth that begins to let the pattern take form. And then of course follows again the fourth step. But we begin to see that all these things work according to definite patterns, and the cycles repeat endlessly.
You will recall that while man was brought forth on the sixth day out of the earth, but particularly focalized in relationship to air, we have on the seventh day the pattern of rest. The seventh day would be in relationship to the earth factor itself, and the pattern of rest from the standpoint of the Divine activity, letting the cycle begin in relationship to its own true nature, the cycle of creation continued, and the movement out of the process of being created to the process of sharing the expression of life from the Creator. Now the day of rest—whatever day may be set aside as primary in this regard; there are those who feel that Friday is the day for rest; some, Saturday; and some, Sunday—in any case, the day of rest has been greatly misunderstood. Rest from what? Rest from all thy labors. Rest from all thy labors! That is not rest from the labor that is of God, or from the work, the action. It does not indicate cessation of movement, or cessation of living. God is not glorified by a cessation in living. “Rest from all thy labors.” The commandment there with respect to keeping a Sabbath day was given to a self-active and stiff-necked people. Human beings are, in their self-centered or fallen state, determined to function according to what they want. They insist on laboring according to their idea, for their own purposes; and this day of rest was emphasized in the commandments because of the necessity of man realizing that there comes a time when man must cease from all his labors, all his own self-active labors, and come into a state of oneness with God, which does not suggest that he will cease functioning. It does not suggest that he will become a nonentity and have no meaning. People wait for Saturday night or for Monday morning, or something of the sort, so that they can plunge back into their labors. They did not learn the lesson of the day of rest, the seventh day, whether it be from the standpoint of a week or a pattern of life, the cycles of being. If we begin to reach maturity as men and women, we cease from all our labors and begin to rest in the Lord, which is to say oneness, which allows the activity of God to manifest through us. As far as we are concerned we utilize every day as a day of attunement with God and, while we allow the pattern of Sunday, because it is the ordinarily accepted pattern, to be a day for a cessation from the regular work, that is not in the true sense keeping the Sabbath.
No human being has reached a point of keeping the Sabbath until he or she has matured into a Divine Man or Woman, so that that individual is no longer concerned with his own labors. “Thou shalt not labor”—in the pattern of his own, your own, cycle of function; your own purpose, self-centeredness. We are allowed six days, or six steps in the creative cycle, to allow us to move from the state of the fallen realm to the state of restoration—six steps.
Now we have noted that from the standpoint of the Class we have proceeded to about the third day. These six steps are allowed to all human beings. We, from the standpoint of the Class, have reached a point of about the third day, the point where we can let the waters be gathered together and let the dry land appear; let the manifestation of the substance we are to work with actually appear in the pattern of our lives and ministry so that, through our service in sharing God's creative cycles, we may cause the green grass of life to appear in those whom we serve. The process of giving an attunement is to gather the waters into one place, let the dry land appear, let the grass be brought forth out of the earth. Until we begin to see the definite relationship between the creative cycles as outlined here, our own individual patterns of fulfilment in moving toward a Divine State of restoration, and our ministry from the standpoint of serving, we cannot see clearly what we are doing. As we here as a Class permit the waters to be gathered together into one place and the dry land appear we can have the manifestation of new life in ourselves, and all the fruitful things of life, which are symbolized in the vegetable kingdom, in the animal kingdom, in the birds, in the fish, etc., can begin to have meaning in us—a fruitful life, results appearing, something being accomplished. But we cannot have the fifth day, or the completion of the third day even, we cannot have the sixth day of fulfilment, unless we let the first days have their true meaning.
Now with respect to the fourth day, let us remember that it was the clearing of the atmosphere around the earth that allowed the light of the sun and the stars to reach the surface of the earth so that that light could be seen. The sun and the moon and the stars were not created on the fourth day, as some have supposed. That makes it seem that the earth was the center of the cosmos, that it is the most important thing that there is anywhere, and that God, on the fourth day, decided that this earth itself needed some stars out there in the sky. That leaves us with a completely false concept. Actually what happened was that the earth's atmosphere cleared of the heavy cloud blanket, so that the light of the sun and the moon and the stars could reach the surface of the earth, and if man had been on earth at that time he could have begun to see these bodies in the sky; but they were there before that. But the light of them was brought in to the surface of the earth on that day, and the cycle began to move on the basis of the seasons: “And they shall be for days, and for years, and for seasons.” So the cycles of the seasons began to open up on the fourth day. Everything began to fall into its proper place.
What is the right season? It is the season where there is the fitness of things, wisdom, the recognition of light, or God's love and creative power causing all things to work out in their season, according to the fitness of things. So when we let the cloudiness of the mind and heart be cleared away so that the light of the Son of God can reach us, we begin to reach a point where we can work in harmony with the days and the years, the seasons, so that all things may come in their proper pattern. The fitness of things—until we have that experience and let the fire have meaning in us and to us and through us, we cannot move to the fifth day, where we begin to let the reality of life appear for ourselves and for others. We are still back behind the day of the clearing until these cycles work out. So our present purpose is to let the waters be gathered together into one place, let the atmosphere clear, and let the dry land appear so that the light of the sun can manifest on earth in relationship to ourselves.
We remember that the only begotten Son of God is everywhere, at all times. Some people have imagined that the body of Jesus was the only begotten Son of God, and we see how they have by reason of that superstition, that false idea, nullified their own lives. There was a revelation of the only begotten Son of God, but we are to be sons and daughters of God, and Jesus was not, in His manifest expression in form, the only begotten Son of God, in the sense of a being. But He was revealing that which issues forth from God all the time. The only begotten Son of God—that is, that which issues forth from God all the time—is the spirit of God, the reality of His wisdom, His intelligence, His understanding, all that issues forth from God at all times. That was revealed through our Lord on earth. But He as a being was not the only begotten Son of God. He was the focalization for Deity in relationship to this earth, and He still is. So in that sense He could be called the only begotten Son of God. But the idea that He, as a separate being, was the only Son that God ever had is an utterly fantastic superstition. We have to begin to realize that the only begotten Son of God is just as much available to us in this moment as it was to Jesus, which is to say that that which is issuing forth from God in this moment is available to us. Well then, when we let a clearing in consciousness take place on the fourth day, the light, the fire of God's love, that which is of God, reaches us. The sun, the sun in the sky, is a symbol of the only begotten Son of God. Without that which comes from the sun we could not live. Just so, without that which is the only begotten Son of God we cannot truly live; we exist for a moment and die.
So now we are at the point where we can begin to let these things be a reality in us, if we will—if we will let the petty divisions be set aside, if we will reach a point where the water of truth blends the pattern of consciousness into one thing, so that we can let the dry land appear and the light of the sun reach the surface of our earth, coming from God through us into the world—not just coming down from the outside but coming through us, from the inside out. The light of the Son, the only begotten Son of God, begins to reach the surface of us not from the outside, but from the inside expressing outward. Once we begin to see that and let the reality of the spirit of God, that which is issuing forth from God, have manifestation through us because we are sharing in the reality of the only begotten Son of God—which is not in any sense limited to Jesus Christ, although the God Being who was manifest through that body was and is our LORD of Lords and KING of Kings, the focalization of God Beings for us—but the moment we let that which is issuing forth from God have manifestation through us we become a son or daughter of God, and so our relationship with God is established and we can begin to move into the reality of the fifth day, and finally to the sixth, which leads at last to the seventh, the place where we come to rest in oneness with God. Now the Master said, "My Father and I are one. We are one.” And He said, “Follow me.” He, the outer, was completely at rest in the inner Being, so that He was not laboring as a man; He was letting God do the works. “The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works.”
Until we reach the point where we have followed Him through these recreative cycles
to the point where we let the Father do the works,
we have not fulfilled our initial mission on earth;
we are not ready to begin to truly serve.
Let us correlate this with the basic, fundamental principles that are revealed in relationship to the day of Pentecost. We see that the four forces were at work in their natural sequence, and after ten days, “They were all with one accord in one place. There came a sound as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared as if it were cloven tongues of fire sitting upon each of them.” Now let us go backwards, so that we see clearly the pattern of manifestation in relationship to what our LORD pointed out would be the manifestation of power. For He said, “And ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Spirit is come upon you.” Mankind today does not have that power. The churches do not have the power; they just talk about it, but it does not manifest. It began to manifest, but they violated the laws, the cycles, and threw it away. They allowed it to come to the point of the fourth day; but they violated the principles of the first four days and refused to let the fifth, sixth and seventh days manifest; so it was not the fulness of the coming of Pentecost. They only thought it was. So the fifth, sixth and seventh days did not manifest in relationship to the disciples; they did not let it manifest. They threw the power away, and the churches since that time simply have not had it. Now it is time for us to let that power manifest. How shall we do it? By following out the cycles of creation.
Let us note what they did do. The fourth of the four forces is fire. “There appeared as if it were cloven tongues of fire which sat upon each of them.” That is the fourth step. Let us back up. Something filled the whole house where they were sitting—the house, the physical aspect of being, or the earth. And then we go back of that: “And there came a sound as of a rushing mighty wind.” Wind, air. So we have fire, earth, and air. We are backing up now to find the starting point. “When they were all with one accord in one place”—"Let the waters be gathered together unto one place”—"there came a sound”; there is movement. Remember how it was in relationship to the beginning of creation: “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters; and God said, Let there be light.” So we have water, air, earth, and fire. The same cycle was used exactly. Water—”with one accord in one place.” And the moving—”There came a sound as of”—what?—”a rushing mighty wind” (“And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”) “and it filled the whole house”—earth—“where they were sitting. And there appeared as if it were cloven tongues of fire sitting upon each of them.” The four forces at work, clearly portrayed in relationship to the day of Pentecost. And they came in their right sequence: water, air, earth, and fire.
But the disciples did not let the cycle continue; they did not even let these fully manifest. They did not go to the fifth day, and then the sixth, and then the seventh, at which point they would have reached a state of oneness with God, which would have allowed them to carry on the work of our LORD on earth. The work of our LORD has not been carried out on earth since He left. The disciples let it get partway, to the fourth day, and then they spoiled it. They spoiled it, and the work of the LORD has not been done by any of the churches, by any of the people of the churches. They have been playing children's games. The power of God has not been made manifest through any church, no matter what it was called. Whether it was Buddhist, or Mohammedan, or so-called Roman Catholic, or so-called Protestant, it makes no difference. No one of them on the face of the whole earth is letting the power of God manifest in any real sense—not in the sense that the LORD intended. Why? Because they have not stopped to see the reality of the creative cycles—the Magic of Creation. They have not recognized our relationship to those cycles. They have not even seen how Peter spoiled it. The power disappeared almost at once, and yet they still imagine that Peter was doing a wonderful thing. He spoiled it; he did not do a wonderful thing. He led those who followed him into patterns which violated the laws of God and the creative cycle. And the power was lost, and man still does not have it. He imagined that he had it, but he did not. What he had was not the real manifestation of power, the power of God at work on earth. And it does not come until the reality of the day of rest—that is, when man goes through the cycle of restoration.
This creative cycle, then, is something which must manifest through us. It is not something we can ignore and have the power. If we follow Peter of old, and his impulsive nonsense, and his sacrilegious defiance of God's laws and principles which the Master had clearly revealed to him, we will not have the power. There is only one way that that power can manifest, and that is according to these laws and principles of being. And so we begin to give heed to them; we begin to realize that until we pass through the third day—and we are just in the third day here—and the fourth day, and the fifth day, and the sixth day, and come to the seventh day, we will not have the power. We will not be in the Garden of Eden. We will not be letting the things which God prepared, in the future, come into manifestation through us.
Man has wandered around in the wilderness, he has had all kinds of fantastic concepts, he has followed fanatics, he has been governed by prejudice and fear, and has failed to let the will of God be done on earth as it is in heaven. He has failed to let the Kingdom come. It is not here. They talk about a spiritual kingdom: “It is not supposed to be here; it is just a spiritual kingdom.” No, it is a Kingdom on earth. “Thy kingdom come” into form on earth. So until we realize these things and see what they did at the time of the day of Pentecost, why they failed, why the power was lost, we cannot go through the cycle successfully and let the power reappear. Now this opportunity is open to any man or woman anywhere—anywhere, at any time, if they will follow through in the cycle. But man has been trying to leap from the state of mere existence to the state of being a son or daughter of God. And since he could not do it while he lived, he did it when he died. It is just foolishness—plain, simple foolishness. We must begin to realize that unless we individually and collectively take these steps we are not going to have the manifestation of power. Unless we see this cycle working in relationship to what the disciples did do, letting it start—they spoiled it, they threw it away, but it did start—we cannot possibly have any real hope for doing better. But we should be able to do better than they did. If we do not, it is just too bad. Someone had better do better sooner or later, and if it is to be someone else, why are we here?
We have reached the point where we can let the waters be gathered together into one place; we can be with one accord in one place. We can yield to the spirit of God, let the firmament appear, to divide the waters from the waters. We can hear the sound as of a rushing mighty wind. We can let the water be in the sea and let the dry land appear, and it can fill the whole house where we are sitting, right here, just as well in this hour as any other. [greatcosmicstory.blogspot.com/2022/04/repose-peace-serenitybe-still-and-know.html] But I know you will probably postpone it a little longer. People always postpone it; they would not let it be today. But it could be now. We could let it reach the surface, we could let the dry land appear, we could let the light of the sun appear, and then we could move on into the fifth day, doing what has never been done by any group of people anywhere since man fell. Others have reached the point of the fourth day, but no group of people since the fall has ever passed through the fourth day—not one in all history, on the face of the whole earth. And of individuals, our LORD, He showed the way through the Seven Days of the Creative Cycle, and we are called upon to follow Him.
People imagine that they are following Him when they say, “I believe that Jesus died on the cross to save me from my sins.” That is sacrilege and blasphemy. They are not following Him. We do not follow Him unless we go through the seven-day cycle and finally come to rest in the Father, as He prayed: “That they may be one, as we are.” But no one knows that oneness until he reaches the seventh day—the seventh day in the cycle, where you come to rest in God and cease from all your labors, and you do not wake up a few hours later and plunge back into your own labors. Once you leave your labors behind it is forever. And the days of the week have been here to remind man of this down through the millennia and man has ignored the plain, obvious truth. He has imagined that because he stopped working on the seventh day and either made a long face and would not let anyone play at all, or went out and had a game of golf or something, that he was keeping the Sabbath, or the day of rest. The day of rest has not been kept. You find that the Seventh-Day Adventists, for instance, really go overboard talking about keeping the seventh day, but they do not do it. They do not do it. It is not what day in the week you have for rest, if you do not reach the seventh day—and it has to be the seventh day; the sixth day will not work; the first day will not work—come to the seventh day in the cycle of creation, the seventh step, the point of restoration to oneness, the point where we begin to truly let the Garden of Eden appear again on earth. That is what the Master did, and He said, “Follow me.” And human beings have imagined that they were, by keeping some day of the week—Friday or Saturday or Sunday. From the standpoint of relaxation it is all right; we use it as a period for meditation in services, and so on. But you cannot find in a day of the week the day of rest; for the day of rest comes as a cycle, a step in the creative cycle. Until we begin to actually see this, and know it, we will keep on deluding ourselves.
Whether it takes six months or six years to get through the first six days for any individual, he will come to his day of rest when he lets himself be restored to oneness, when he reaches the point where he ceases from all of his labors and lets the Father do the works from then on. And there will be no return to doing your works on Monday morning. The cycle was not completed by the disciples; they spoiled it; they did not let it appear. Man has thrown it away time after time down through the ages, and he is doing it still. Of all the millions who think they are following our LORD, unless they are moving through that cycle to the day of rest from self-activity they are not following Him, no matter what they think, or what church they belong to, or anything else. The smug self-righteousness which bars the way of man if he would really move forward! Until we come to the day of rest—rest from all our labors, rest from all self-activity—and from that day on let the LORD do the works, we have not kept the Sabbath. A day in the week can be used as a symbol of the Sabbath, but a day of the week is not the Sabbath. The commandment is not talking about the days of the week. “Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the sabbath; in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, or any of thy family.” No. The six days of creation, which are not twenty-four-hour days for us, fortunately—if you had to do it in six twenty-four-hour days you would not have a chance—but the six days of creation must work out through you if you are to come to your day of rest, rest in the Lord, oneness, letting the Father do the works from that moment onward.
We have reached the third day in six months. In six months we have reached the third day. But you have not yet let the waters be gathered together into one place. You have not yet let the dry land appear. You have not yet let the sun appear at the surface of your earth, and that is just the fourth day. Unless we go on through the days of creation, individually and collectively, we will not come to the day of rest; and unless we come to the day of resting in the Father we will not have the power. The power started to appear so that they could have their fifth day and their sixth day and come to the seventh day, but would they let it come? No. Impulsive Peter, and all the others that followed him, went out and started dissipating it, violating every law of God and throwing away the rich blessings which would have changed the world nineteen centuries ago. It was not until after that—after all of this waste, after they had failed to let God's will be done on earth as it was in heaven—that the Book of Revelation was written. The cycle was opened so that man would have another chance, and we are living in the days of that chance. That is why I am here. That is why you are here. One more chance. If man does not take this one he will destroy himself—not because God so ordained it, but there is no other way of reaching man. All of the religious concepts in the world mean nothing from the standpoint of the coming of the Kingdom or the fulfilment of the will of God: the outworking of the seven days of creation in man that we might come to the Sabbath. We cannot have a Sabbath just by resting on Saturday, or Sunday; that is not the Sabbath. The Sabbath is that step in the creative cycles where you come to rest in God, where you have finished all of your labors and from thenceforward you let the Father do the works.
So the question is, What will we do about it? What will you do about it? How important is it? Is something else more important than going through this creative cycle and reaching the Seventh Day, the Sabbath, where we come to rest with one accord in one place? I could not begin to describe to you the joy and the glory and the wonder of that privilege of coming to the Sabbath, the real day of rest, the things of God restored on earth, and you restored to the state of Divine Men and Women. But you will never get there unless you take the path that leads through those six days of creation, unless you let the creative magic have meaning in you. Otherwise you will go the way of all the millions that have existed on the face of the earth for a moment and died. What shall it be? The way of God or the way of man? The way of life or the way of death? The way of failure or the way of victory? Only as we go through the cycles and come at last to the Sabbath, which is symbolized by the days of the week, can we know what it is to be what God created us to be.
