It is not enough merely to gain a reasonably accurate vision of the basic principles of the Divine Pattern. We must reach a point where we recognize the nature of man's variations and his deviations so that we can intelligently work to correct them. Merely acknowledging them, merely seeing them is of no value. Attempting to arbitrarily upset them or override them, accomplishes nothing. We must learn how to deal wisely with them.
In our consideration of Biblical history we have recognized the pattern outworking up to and including Jacob's Blessing, as it is called, upon his sons. There is a great deal here that we might study yet more, but I think we will pass it by for the moment, and if time permits we may touch upon some of the other points later. But we recall that Jacob left this sphere of things and there was the burial; they had the body embalmed and the Egyptians mourned for him three score and ten days—seventy days—three score and ten days, and Joseph took “chariots and horsemen; and a very great company and went up to the threshing floor of Atad, which is beyond Jordan, and there they mourned with a great and very sore lamentation: and he made a mourning for his father seven days. And when the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, saw the mourning in the floor of Atad, they said, This is a grievous mourning to the Egyptians: wherefore the name of it was called Abel-miz-raim, which is beyond Jordan. And his sons did unto him according as he commanded them, and they buried him. And Joseph returned into Egypt, he, and his brethren, and all that went up with him to bury his father, after he had buried his father.”
So, that particular point was passed and then we note the influence of internal trends in the individual. “And when Joseph's brethren saw that their father was dead, they said, Joseph will peradventure hate us, and will certainly requite us all the evil which we did unto him. And they sent a messenger unto Joseph, saying. Thy father did command before he died, saying. So shall ye say unto Joseph, Forgive, I pray thee now, the trespass of thy brethren, and their sin; for they did unto thee evil: and now, we pray thee, forgive the trespass of the servants of the God of thy father. And Joseph wept when they spake unto him. And his brethren also went and fell down before his face; and they said. Behold, we be thy servants. And Joseph said unto them, Fear not: for am I in the place of God? But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive. Now therefore fear ye not: I will nourish you, and your little ones. And he comforted them, and spake kindly unto them.” It is interesting to note the pattern of Joseph's expression carrying out the pattern of the Divine Attitude:
“Fear not:
for am I in the place of God?
But as for you, ye thought evil against me;
but God meant it unto good,
to bring to pass, as it is this day,
to save much people alive.”
YouTube Audio
Now there is one of the points where all responding ones tend to fall down, tend to fail to grasp adequately the significance of this important aspect of the Divine process of outworking. In this connection we recall the text, “All things work together to perfection for those who love and serve the Lord.”
All things work together to perfection for those who love and serve the LORD
This does not mean that everything is going to be the way you would like it to be, it does not mean that it is going to be comfortable and entirely satisfactory to the concepts of your mind, or that you will have what you want, whenever you want, the way you want it. It means that human beings think evil and try to produce evil—and even though there may be many things that are not according to the right pattern of function in relationship to your own personal problems, your own personal life in relationship to others, will be caused to bring forth a blessing if you stay centered and let it be so.
The human mind is inclined to judge and say, “Well now, this is against me. That, I do not like. The other thing is contrary to God's Will.” Suppose Joseph had said, when he was in the pit and heard his brothers talking about selling him as a slave, “Well I know it is not God's Will that my brothers should sell me. What an insulting thing. What a degrading thing is this. I know this is not God's Will.” No, it was not God's Will, it was not His Design. It was merely the manner in which He utilized the situation. God does not produce the ill thing. The ill thing, whatever it may be, or may have been, is not and was not necessary, but since that is the case by reason of human function, God can and does use it to advantage. It is a process of out-maneuvering man.
If you function effectively with God, regardless of the oppositions and the difficulties and the problems that arise, either now or in the days of your ministry that are ahead of you, you will find that, staying centered, God is capable of out-maneuvering man, out-maneuvering the intents and purposes of human beings so that He can cause that which man does to bring forth a blessing. But it does not mean you are going to have it, all the way along, the way you think you would like to have it. It will not be the best that could be probably, in many respects, but all things work together to perfection for those who truly love and serve the Lord. And what is perfection? I believe you have studied this somewhat in your Class work, but perhaps it would be well to re-emphasize it a little.
What is perfection?
Perfection is not, as far as we are concerned, some ideal future state. As far as we are now concerned, the Edenic State, that which is to be after the restoration is complete, is not perfection. What is perfection, as far as we are concerned now? Perfection is right function under the circumstances as they are, the right attitude in meeting problems that arise and dealing with them. Right function in circumstances as they are, is perfection.
In other words, we use perfection in dealing with that which is not right and we do not have to have everything right in order to have perfection. If you think that you have to have everything right all around you in order to function in perfection, you are wrong—you do not. You learn to function in perfection in relationship to all adverse things, all ill things, all things that are not as they ought to be. It does not take a perfect environment in the sense of having everything on a perfectly pleasing basis to function in perfection. That which is perfect today probably would not be perfect tomorrow, probably would not have been perfect yesterday. That which is perfect today is the right meeting of the situation as it is today, including all of the ill things, all of the adverse factors.
We must not think of perfection as a fixed and static thing, as something final, as something that simply does not change. The perfections of God are forever changing. We may say that there are perfect basic laws that never change, yes. Those laws do not change but the patterns of their application are forever changing and it is because of this that human beings so readily develop false concepts about what the perfect law is; they see its working in a given circumstance and they jump to a conclusion, “This is the eternal law.”
All they have seen is an application of its working in relationship to a specific condition and generally speaking, the human vision is not great enough to comprehend all of the factors which were being dealt with in that specific application of the perfect law. And once you begin to see this, you can readily understand how human beings, approaching the problem from the wrong direction, are subject to, well, all sorts of fantasia. It becomes something that produces all sorts of appearances, and the human beings may be ever so sincere and earnest and believe that they know what they saw, and to some extent maybe they did, but all they saw was the working, without a comprehension of the reality of the law. In this connection we might well take just a moment to recognize a particular concept or idea which should be helpful to you in the days to come. I think we will undertake to use an illustration or two.
If any of you have ever functioned in relationship to irrigation, Just as one illustration, you have a ditch which is bringing in your head of water. From that main supply ditch you establish certain laterals. But when the head of water first starts coming through the ditch it is usually full of trash, twigs, dirty, completely unsatisfactory for releasing out into these little ditches for irrigation of the plants which may be involved. Now the ordinary human being sees that dirty head of water coming down the ditch and he begins to tear his hair and rend his garments and get all upset and bothered; he says to himself, “I expected some good water here that I could use and look at this dirty head of water coming down here. Shut it off! Shut it off! It is no good.”
In the vibrational sphere of things when the current starts moving, the first manifestation of it is generally a dirty head of water of some sort. It is full of trash. It is not in any sense a revelation of what is back of it. The first current coming through always has the job of cleaning up something, clearing out something, and it is never, in appearance, what it is going to be. When the wind starts to blow, a breeze comes up, at first there may be a blowing of loose leaves and twigs all over the place, but once they have been blown away there is no manifestation of such things. A clearing. So that which first appears in the working of the power of God is not to be misunderstood. It will never come out the way you think it is going to, not to start with anyway, and probably never anywhere along the line because you will need to gain a larger vision. Unless you have had experience, unless you know, you will develop some concepts with respect to that which is to be, which are not true. So do not let such things upset your pattern of consideration.
Now to take this same idea into a little different field, suppose we have a mass of raw material. We might carry this out to a particular orbit in relationship to our own sun. There is evidence that a planet was demolished, there was a collision of a planet or perhaps something else, a comet—we are not going into that at the moment—but whatever it was, a planet blew up, was broken all to pieces, and in the orbit where this planet belongs, revolving around our sun just as our earth does, we have the planetoids, and these irregular bodies—some very small, some down to dust particles in fact, gravel, all different sizes, and some chunks quite large, a good deal bigger than a house for instance, and some of them a great deal larger than that, like this mountain out here—start suddenly floating into space, great chunks of this planet, and they are out there now, moving around in their orbit, started out in the orbit but there they are, the raw material. Now just suppose we should reach a point in the Cosmic outworking of things where the time had arrived to gather up all this raw material and put it together in the form of a planet. It is a little larger order than I suggest should be assigned to you at the moment, but it is an idea—and one of the things that needs to be done some day. Now, we have the sun, and we have the planets revolving around the sun at different distances—we will not attempt to portray that in any true sense at the moment—but the idea that these planetoids, chunks of an exploded planet, are circling around the sun in a particularized orbit. If we were going to start gathering that up to re-establish a planet pattern, what would we do?
Well, we would have to devise some means of exerting force on physical substance. We will skip that part of it for the moment. You might go out and try it so I will not tell you about that. But it would be a process of gathering this substance together, and as it came together it would have to be whirling like a great whirlpool. There would be a suction pattern involved, and it would have to work on a sort of funnel pattern, something like the principles involved in a nebula; and all of this whirling around, revolving, gathering the substance up to one point, would make it appear like a horrible, well, mess of chunks of material and dust and one thing or another, everything swirling, and nothing very fine about it.
And suppose you folks were getting this job done, and hard at work at it, and I came along and looked at it and said, “I thought you were going to make a nice planet? I thought you were going to have something lovely here? What is that mess? There is not any planet here. These chunks do not know where they are going, they do not know where they are going to land, it is just swirling, swirling. There is no planet, there is nothing. And here you talked about having a planet.” And I started treating you with scorn. It would show how little I knew about creative processes, would it not? Because it has to be swirling and in seeming turmoil before all of the factors can come to point; the gravitational factors, so that all this substance can be welded together, as it were, drawn to a particularized pattern. And the form of the planet has to appear before you start being concerned about getting vegetation on the outside of it, putting animals on it, or whatever other pattern of creation you are going to have. There are many forms of creation other than what we have here and man is inclined to think that if there is not a creation like we have here, well it is not a creation, there is no life, etc. But you would have to get the substance together before you could begin to people your planet, get the animals established, the vegetation and what-have-you.
Now this process of swirling, utter confusion from any ordinary standpoint, could be called evil. [greatcosmicstory.blogspot.com/nothing-is-wrong.html] But perfect function on your part in the focalization of the creative power of God, would mean that you would have it swirling until that part was done. But suppose you started to get this swirling process under way and this person said, “Well now, I do not like this business. I am going to go over here and create a flower. There should be a flower that should go on this planet. That is a mess. I am going to create a flower.” And this person left his job and said, “I am going to create an animal and then a bird. I am going to have things ready. I will have a pair of them. I do not think that is ever going to work. I do not know where I will put my bird when I get it done.” But anyway, they started leaving their jobs. What would happen? The whole thing would go to pieces. So there would be chaos instead of seeming chaos.
Perfect function then is on the basis of the immediate need. There might come a time later on when it would be perfect function for you to create a bird or a flower or something of the sort, but if you started creating birds and flowers while you were supposed to be getting the planet ready to start with, maybe some angels with little white coats would come along looking for you. The point is that it would be plain crazy. Perfect function at any moment of time is on the basis of the circumstances as they are, regardless of whether they are good, bad or indifferent, regardless of whether they are pleasing to you or not, or pleasing to anyone. Perfect function in any moment is correct function in relationship to that situation, and if you are going to evaluate the situation you should not be nearsighted while you do it, because the situation might include a lot of factors that you start to ignore.
If you see some particular point in a situation and say, “Well now, I do not like this. Perfect function, Uranda said, is action with respect to the situation as it is. Now here is the situation. I am going to do something about it.” That is not the situation. It is only a part of the situation. It is only one aspect of it, one point of the situation. Do you know the whole situation? Correct function is in relationship to that which is brought to focus in the realm of your understanding and vision and correct action. And that which is the focus point in relationship to yourself may contain the essences of all the factors, but if you are not alert you will overlook them and you will be trying to do something with a situation on a basis which is totally wrong, because you have not stopped to consider the fact that the focus of a situation as it comes to you, as it comes within the range of your observation, and perhaps influence of action, must not be assumed to be the whole thing.
If someone drove a nail through a wooden wall and you saw just a point of that nail sticking through the wall, you would know better than to assume that that point was all there was to the nail. You would know that there was a lot of the nail that is not visible, and the head of it was around on the other side. You might be able to drive it back a little bit, but if you wanted to extract that nail from the board you would have to go to the other side of the board and pull it back. The focus of the situation as it comes to you is only that, and do not assume it is the whole thing. It may contain essences of the whole thing and if you are alert you will know what to do about it. But right function in relationship to the situation as it is, not merely as it seems to be, is perfection. Perfect function on the basis of what is the actual fact, not merely the appearance of the moment.
The impulse of the human mind or heart may be to do thus and so, but you learn to distinguish between the impulses which arise on the basis of reaction to external things and the impulse of the spirit of God. There is an important point! Very important. You learn to distinguish between the impulses which arise in yourself as a human being, on the basis of a reaction to external things or to some factor within yourself, and the impulses which come to you through the working of the spirit of God. Actually, it is very easy to make that distinction, to distinguish between them, but you cannot put it into just so many words. I cannot say a sentence or two here and clarify the matter for you; no one can. It is something that works out through training. You have to be assisted along the way. It takes training and experience and application.
So you learn to distinguish with respect to the impulses which come within the realm of your awareness, and you learn to act on the basis of that which comes to focus in relationship to yourself, but you are taking into consideration all that is focalized in that which you see, and perfection in function is right action in relationship to that which is at the moment, and an hour later it will be different; it will not be the same. Tomorrow will be different. Factors will change. Nothing is static. So right function in one moment is never arbitrarily right function in another. No. Some people imagine that if it is perfect action, well then, perfect action is perfect action and you can indulge in perfect action any time. Well, you can, but it is not the same thing as it was yesterday. It changes always. And so perfection of function depends upon the factors with which you are dealing.
And so we have the Word here, of Joseph, “But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.” And so we begin to see how all things do work together to perfection for those who love and serve the LORD, for those who are properly centered, and who are servers, and only for them do all things work together to perfection.
