“…there is no man that hath left house, or parents, or brethren, or wife,
or children, for the kingdom of God's sake, Who shall not receive manifold more in this present
time, and in the world to come life everlasting.” (Luke 18: 28-30 King James Bible (KJV).
“And the angel said unto her, Fear
not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God.
And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and
shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be
great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give
unto him the throne of his father David:
And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his
kingdom there shall be no end.” (Luke 1: 30-33 (KJV).
(My emphasis). The endless kingdom (of which the angel mentioned to Mary at the birth
of Jesus the Christ) must be understood
in order for fleshly mortals to comprehend its importance. This kingdom-without-end certainly
isn’t the material or fleshly realm
of existence. Rather, the divine kingdom
of which the angel spoke resides in the spiritual
realm of existence, which is our true, ever-lasting place. The resurrection of Christ Jesus was his own awakening to this forever place. This forever place exists for us all, despite
our finite, material blindness of it. Our
forever place is in the spiritual realm, which has no ties to a finite,
material sense of reality. Entering our true,
spiritual home (the spiritual realm of God) is required of each of us; but it
is not a physical place. It is a spiritual awakening from within our
deepest memories. Thus, only by
awakening to it, do we find it. In order to spiritually awaken, we must realize
that life in the physical so-called realm is a mental state of self-deception;
for life, itself, is an immortal, spiritual fact, not a finite, physical
phenomenon. There is no material life
of anything, or anyone. We are each a spiritual
being, sleeping in the collective dream of material existence. In short, we are sleeping in the dream of
materiality, rather than realizing that we are really in the realm of divine
Spirit, God, for there is no other real place
to be. And before we can follow the way,
or path of Christ Jesus, we must begin to
awaken spiritually and leave the mental, finite dream state behind. Now, this is not a quick
fix. The collective dream-state
envelopes this world’s inhabitants until each individual awakens himself and
herself out of the materialistic dream of existence, and replaces it with the
spiritual understanding that begins to dawn within our remembering thoughts. Thus, the path of spiritual thinking becomes
the stepping-stones to follow out of the collective dream of finiteness. No one spiritually awakens
another to his or her spiritual identity.
Each individual must find the kingdom of God from within the innate
truths of God’s spiritual realm that sleeps
in everyone’s dream-state. The best illustration I can think of is to be
found in the well-known story of The Wizard of Oz (which I’ve mentioned
in several other articles.) This story presents a girl,
Dorothy, who falls into a deep sleep from a knock on her head and dreams of a
place called, Oz. The dream of Oz is a
place where things are sometimes beautiful, but often frightening. So, Dorothy, still sleeping in her dream of
Oz, eventually wants to go home. But she
can’t go home, because she can’t find her way out of her dream of Oz. Finally, a friendly, good witch
tells Dorothy that she’d always had, within her sleeping-self, the way
to go ‘home’. She was to click her heels
together and say, ‘there’s no place like
home’. When Dorothy obeyed the good witch,
the dream of Oz was broken, and Dorothy awoke from the Oz dream, and found that
she had always been home…she just hadn’t recognized the place, because the
dream-state had been covering her true, conscious awareness of reality. That deception is still happening
to all of us that believe that our physical form is killing us, when, in
spiritual fact, we have no physical
bodies or forms to begin with. Instead, we are really spiritual beings, who
have never been anyone other than the immortal, spiritual children of God. Christ Jesus showed us this spiritual reality
when he went through the physical death experience, only to show himself
completely alive again, three days after his physical death. And after a few days of showing his deathless
body to his disciples and a few others, he left this material sense of himself
in what is called ‘the ascension’ because he was never, really a physical
mortal to begin with—and neither are we. Because we are spiritual,
rather than material beings, our physical forms never had any life in
them. Our true bodies have always been
spiritual in substance, eternally whole and perfect. When we seem to die from the physical form,
we do disappear from physical view;
but that never stopped Jesus, or anyone else from continuing their existence in
the spiritual realm, (where our limited,
physical bodies with eyes, ears and other material senses do not go). Since the birth of Jesus,
the Christ, the teachings of Jesus and his many disciples have covered the
globe. Christianity has brought forth
many references to the kingdom of God
and where this kingdom is to be found. Yet,
being a spiritual place, the kingdom of God doesn’t really exist in any location
of this world. One simple statement
about God’s kingdom is found in the New Testament book of Luke 17:20-22; King
James Bible Version. This states: “And when he was demanded of the Pharisees,
when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of
God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo
here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” This answer appears to say
that the ever-lasting kingdom of God is within the memory-banks of each
and every one of us and that it doesn’t exist out there, in the material world
of form. So, when we think of God’s
creation, we are not to think of it as a finite, physical place. In fact, the world, out there, filled with
all that our eyes and ears unfold from the material scene, isn’t God’s kingdom;
rather, it is our false, material sense
of God’s kingdom, which are seen
through the limits of our material sights and sounds. Thus, beyond our beliefs of
a physical reality (that seems to hide spiritual reality from us) the invisible
kingdom of God is still the only kingdom that exists. Yet, it is not to be found in the material dream-sense
of things. It is found ‘within us’, that is, within our true,
spiritual consciousness. This innate,
spiritual consciousness is forever present to be called upon whenever one turns
God-ward for divine guidance or deliverance from harm. Now, before our human
ancestors fell into a collective sleep of materiality (or finite, fleshly
forms) we were fully awake to the
spiritual sense of our being. At
that time, only one kingdom of God was ever in existence and that kingdom was,
and still is, spiritual in Substance. So, to find our way Home, back to the heavenly
harmony and foreverness of being, we must go within ourselves, and
awaken to it. We must realize that the seeming creation of
materiality is still the dream-state of a false sense of ourselves. There’s nothing ‘out there’
in the material scene, however vast the material universe presents itself. God created only One Creation, and we’re still
in it. We’ve never been out of it. We just don’t perceive it, because
we’re looking in the wrong places, and with our wrong eyes and ears. The kingdom of God that
so-called ‘mortals’ seek will never be found ‘out there’, in the externalized
creation of finite forms. It’s only to
be found in our memory banks. For the
never-ending kingdom of God has never left us; it’s just where God left it… to
be perceived when our spiritual sleepers awaken to it and material beliefs
evaporate away. |
