"The word of the LORD came unto me again, saying, What mean ye, that ye use this proverb concerning the land of Israel, saying, The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge? As I live, saith the Lord GOD, ye shall not have occasion any more to use this proverb in Israel. Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine:" (Ezekiel 18: 1-4) "…as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly. Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption. Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality." (I Corinthians 15: 49-53). "The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God:" (Romans 8: 16). "For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father." (Romans 8: 14, 15). "And Jesus said unto the centurion, Go thy way; and as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee. And his servant was healed in the selfsame hour." (Matthew 8:13).
More than once in my lifetime, I've heard tell of someone who had developed a diseased condition which had earlier afflicted members of either the father's or mother's side of the family…in other words, a genetically inherited disease. What was peculiar, of these particular stories, was that the people so afflicted had been adopted, and no such disease was found in their birth families. The common element that seemed to be shared by these afflicted ones was that they didn't know that they'd been adopted. So, when conditions seemed right, and full acceptance of fleshly family identity was in consciousness, the symptoms would begin to appear. Soon, the diseased condition was upon them in the flesh or human personality. Expecting to copy the disease of a parent (or someone else in the family tree) leads one to accept the mental suggestions of such a fate; it leads to the belief that something is, or could be, inevitable. Assessing one's identity from a material manifestation of condition and health is the universal practice which leaves the mind, or consciousness, out of the equation. Had those who suffered this experience been told that they were adopted, they might have suffered from other things they believed in, but certainly not the disease they developed because not even material science was on the side of causation. Christ Jesus, whose ministry was centered around healing all disease which had materialized in the flesh and also preaching that the Kingdom of God was invisibly present to deliver humanity from all false beliefs of fleshly identity, said to "Call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven." (Matthew 23: 9). He also said once, "Who is my mother, or my brethren? For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother."(Mark 3: 33 & 35). Jesus gave no credence to the claim of physical, genetic laws of health and inheritance when he healed the sick and sinning. Yet, knowing the seeming power that material belief can wield in the human experience, (realizing that in this human, material sense of existence, all of our beliefs manifest themselves in our life experiences) he corrected the lies of fleshly inheritances. These two statements above are a direct reference to hereditary claims; they correct the whole idea of suffering from our ancestors' beliefs and mistakes, by telling humanity to realize that God, Spirit, is our true and only source, and establishing each one's individual connection to God. By casting out such worldly beliefs about people, we replace such false teachings with the spiritual fact that we inherit our true bodies, souls and mind from Spirit, not matter or the flesh. Material identity is the false sense of self—not the truth of our immortal, spiritual being. Also notice that throughout his ministry, Jesus didn't refer to God as his Father and Mother only. No, he presented God as the divine Parent of all creation, which includes all male and female identities. These teachings against accepting the world's belief in material heredity has a practical result. Here's one illustration that brought it home to me: In my early days of spiritual healing, I still accepted material heredity as a physical law over which we have no control. So, when my son was attending a kindergarten through fourth grade school, I enrolled him in a speech therapy class because he had developed a noticeable speech impediment. Now, I knew it was the so-called law of human heredity, because our son was the 'spitting image' of his dad; and this particular speech impairment was in my husband's family. It had missed my husband, but two members of his original family had it in the previous generation. The speech therapist worked with him (if I remember correctly) from second through fourth grade. By that time, there was some improvement, but it was not healed entirely. So, although fairly new to spiritual healing, I decided to commit my effort and thoughts to healing this error on a more spiritual level. I asked the divine Mind, God, to reveal to me what I needed to know, in order for my son to be healed of what appeared to be a genetic law. Now, once having asked this of God, I didn't leave it there. Through many experiences from my past, I knew that to ask God for something which is already present and known to the divine Intelligence, we must then trust that our requests to the Almighty would be answered in our human lives. Turning to God for healing of anything requires that we don't ask in vain—we expect and wait for the answer. What came to my thoughts, almost immediately, was to look up 'sour grapes' in the Bible. I did so, and I found the passage (Ezekiel 18: 1-4) that is printed at the top of this article. ("The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge"). I studied this bible passage carefully, for I recognized that it was about the belief and acceptance of the notion of material heredity. It was saying that what our physical ancestors exhibited, or believed in, cannot, under divine Authority and spiritual law, be passed on to God's other spiritual children. Our ancestors were all God's own spiritual off-spring, just as we each are. Everyone in the human chain of what appears to be our origins is really Spirit's own, belonging to no one else. Soon, I began to absorb the fact that there is no physical chain of being. Although almost universally believed, genetics is a material lie, not a law. There is only ONE of us, and that is the spiritual one. Each of us is an individual expression of the Christ identity, which Jesus tried to bring to our attention. It is our divine Self that we have forgotten in this illusive, mental level of physical-seeming existence. The acceptance of genetic reproduction is a direct result of believing the Adam dream of existence. Believing we've been cut off from our spiritual Source due to some ancient sin, we accept an imaginary punishment from God, and view ourselves as confined in a fleshly, finite form, where we're on our own, under the tyranny of presumed, material law. Contrary to this mental acceptance of being children of the flesh (with family trees and all sorts of good and really bad inheritances) we are each a unique and separate image and likeness of God, and we have a divine heritage that we've forgotten in our material thinking. God is our only Creator and Parent. God is our Source, and wholeness and perfection is the real state of our being, which is immortal and will survive the physical death process. Since this is spiritually true of our body, soul and mind, the material form must conform to this divine Truth, in spiritual healing, despite whatever human belief of material existence seems to be driving the wagon, so to speak. Flaws of the flesh (wherever it is believed that they come from) do not belong to God's own beloved children. I held to these truths for several weeks concerning the presence of the speak impediment. Every time it came to my thoughts that this impairment was something that belonged to him, I stayed firm in my realization that the only things that belonged to him came from God, his true mother, father, and source. Each time I felt like I was trying to fight a law, I reminded myself that God was the only Lawmaker in the universe—and no lies of physical existence had ever touched our human son's true, spiritual being. As I recall, it took a few weeks to feel peaceful about the whole speech thing. When I let go and felt that peace, I knew that my mental battle was over, and the healing was on its way. Gradually, over the next few months, (actually, over whatever time it took me to more fully accept the truth of our son's spiritual identity and freedom from all physical imperfections) I noticed the lessening of the speech impediment. And then it was gone. When I noticed that it was gone, a great sense of God's power and authority came over me. That's why the whole subject of human genetics is rejected by me today. To be a law, it would have to be a spiritual law, not just a worldly, material belief in a law. The universal belief in genetics, which seems to play itself out in the human scene, has its base in the belief of material, rather than spiritual, existence; and it seems to work in the human scene, because of our conviction of it. Yet, once the material belief is cast out of our human consciousness, the natural state of health and harmony returns to our human bodies and experience. Christ Jesus said to the centurion who came to him for a healing of one fleshly-seeming identity, "As thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee." (Matthew 8: 13). On another occasion, when his disciples couldn't properly heal a lunatic child and asked him why not, Jesus replied, "Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you." (Matthew 17: 20). Where we place our beliefs (and we have plenty of them on this human level of thought) our lives express these beliefs, not only in our behavior, but in our daily experiences of health, supply, and even personality traits. Beliefs become where we place our faith, whether for good or bad. If we have faith in laws of lack, disease, injuries, physical inheritances, and other negative things, then these lacks, limitations, and destructions play themselves out in our human experience. When we place our faith in the more positive realm of Spirit, our health, abundance, and harmony also play themselves out in the human scene. If you're wrestling with acceptance of our God-given dominion over the so-called material laws that seem to govern every step of our sojourn here, consider this carefully: IF MATERIAL LAWS ARE, INDEED, FACTS, THEN NO CONTRARY THOUGHTS, BELIEFS, OR FAITH COULD OVERTURN THEM. Laws, by their very nature, do not change. Yet, material laws are overturned all the time, on this planet, by invisible forces that defy physical reality. The physical sciences of this world face these contradictions every day. That's because the belief of materiality as reality is the clay feet of material science. Universal belief is thought projected, and it takes form until universal belief changes through spiritually enlightened thought. Then the forms change to more perfectly pattern the divine reality. The science of physics will lead all followers, eventually, to the science of meta-physics. Many physicists have already seen this metaphysical base beneath form. Global acceptance of more spiritual views of nature and humanity (of spiritual rather than physical being) has become greatly more apparent in the last twenty years or so. It is an inevitable evolution of the carnal mentality; more precisely, it is the gradual spiritual awakening and enlightenment of humanity. Despite all the wars and calamities that divert our attention, as spiritual thought permeates the collective consciousness of our world, new views of spiritual reality will continue to build a new heaven, and a new earth, transformed by the real sons and daughters of God.
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