Bible Interpretations E-Book

Emma Curtis Hopkins

• Herausgeber: Andura Publishing
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Experience the life-changing power of Emma Curtis Hopkins with this unforgettable book.

Leseprobe

Bible Interpretations

Emma Curtis Hopkins

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

From time to time there have been men and women of a character and work unquestionably marking them as sent of Him to announce His will and purpose to the children of men. When such have come among mankind they have not needed the great churches back of them, nor the recognition of the learned and powerful among men to support their claims as ministers of the Gospel of the Good.

It has always been accorded by the wise that the baptism of the Holy Spirit, or the quickening influence of the principle of divine Intelligence is the test of the called to teach the words and will of the Supreme of the universe. Those so called have not needed to quote authorities or precedents for their actions or teachings. They have all spoken as having authority, and not as the scribes or recorders of other men’s teachings. They have all come like messengers of goodness and freedom to men at just the time when the recognized teachers of the world were quoting authorities to hold their doctrines in repute among a dissatisfied and restless people.

When the ancient prophets of the Lord came to teach Truth to the wondering multitudes they found the great lawgivers and teachers holding their own by showing how closely they were keeping to the laws of dead Shemaiah and Abtalion, and because they had no authority in themselves through the quickening Spirit’s influence they must quote Shemaiah and Abtalion, and with passionate zeal discourse upon the terrible importance of the kind and quality of wood best for altars, or the moral deadliness of the use of blood, or the imperativeness of circumcision on the eighth day.

But the sent of the invisible God said; “Thus saieth the Lord,” and the people feared, and repented of their sins at their voices.

When the divinely appointed Jesus came He found the learned Rabbis quoting Hillel and Shammai, and daring not at all to claim wisdom from the Most High Intelligence.

And they were amazed at His doctrine because He taught as vested with authority. Like all the inspired who had preceded Him He proved Himself God-sent by doing God-like works. The suns which had daily set upon crowds of sick and miserable people arose at morning time to overlook joyous multitudes, healed by the divine minister of the Gospel of health. The wicked turned from the error of their ways. The mad and despairing smiled and were at peace. The poor were helped and fed. He did not have to say: “Thus heard I of Hillel or Rabbi Meir or Rabbi Joseph,” but only, “The words that I speak unto you it is not I that speak, but the Father that dwelleth in me. He doeth the works.”

His example has been the inspiration and direction of millions since His time, and when the devoted hearts the world has known have been moved by the best within them to teach mankind of the goodness of the Supreme of the world they have pointed to the unacknowledged Jesus and walked bravely along lonely and untrod ways, teaching and helping the ignorant and unfortunate, regardless of whether the great and proud esteemed them, or the learned recognized their greatness.

There have been such lonely workers in our own time. They have all heard the voice of the Spirit and felt the impulse of goodness stirring them to go forth to help the world. They have looked over the religions and sciences of the intellectually great which have held sway in the hearts of the people, and have noted that under their ages of dominion there have been abuses and unjust dealings which the religions and sciences have proved powerless to abolish or bring into disrepute.

Their hearts, being moved in compassion, have strengthened their judgments till they cry with one voice against the old disputations, and with one voice declare for a new and a true, wherein the poor may be taught and befriended, women walk fearless and glad, and children be safe and free. Every fibre and thread of their being, every instant of their time is absolutely dedicated to the prophesied new dispensation of the Holy Spirit with its Ministry of healing from every ill known to the old times.

They are called Christian scientists* because they have set in order the teachings of the one who was called The Christ, and because they can do the works which are the outcome of His teachings understood. In all particulars they are a repetition upon a new plane of His experience in giving to the world His doctrine of salvation from fleshly bondages. In all particulars they are a repetition of the experiences of those who followed Him and believed in His doctrines one thousand nine hundred years ago. They preach the powerlessness of evil and the unreality of the material universe. They declaim against the necessity for evil in any form of sin, sickness or death. They declare the Omnipresence of God, the Good, and deny the presence or working power of any other principle but the Good. They demonstrate that the denial of evil as a reality or working principle puts evil into the nothingness from whence it sprang, by putting all forms of evil completely out of and away from the life experiences, when they deal with principles of Goodness, the only reality. They are proving daily what was the teachings of Christ and His immediate followers by new interpretations of His words and imitation of His works. They insist that the right interpretations of His words have never been given to the people by the great intellects who have taken them in charge to expound and explain.

*The term “Christian science” as used in these lessons stands for the scientific teaching of Jesus Christ as understood by Emma Curtis Hopkins.—Ed. note.

They urge that the misinterpretations of His teachings are accountable for all the pain and suffering and wickedness believed in by all mankind since His beautiful lifetime, when the multitude rejoiced in health and peace wherever He walked among them,

They do not ask those preachers who have wrested His wonderful words from their true meanings to give sanction to their right interpretations nor beg of them to recognize them as a ministry of the old interpretations, whose inefficiency they scorn. They set boldly forth with His true teachings, as sure of their calling to the work as Peter of old, who preached salvation to the Gentiles because it had been spiritually revealed to him that true salvation was for Gentiles as surely as for Jews, or as boldly and bravely as Paul, the Roman Citizen, who had all his travels and works mapped plainly out for him by that Holy Spirit, whose mark, being set in the forehead, none may dispute its authority.

These people are the apostles of a new dispensation. They usher in the dawn of a new time when evil shall be known no more among men, because Christ the Truth has come again in the way of His perfect doctrine revealed anew to the waiting world. They have for their rallying cry, “Not by might, nor by strength but by My Spirit saith the Lord,” which was a watchword of the inspired prophets of old. They lay hold with a mighty faith upon the God of the ancient Hebrews as the only God able to save from evil beliefs. They are fulfilling that prophecy literally which reads, that in the last days of the world of belief in evil, “Men of all languages shall lay hold of the skirts of Him that is a Jew, saying: we will go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.”

They teach of Him as a very present help in every time of trouble, even to the saving from fiery furnaces, lions’ teeth and angry kings, as unto Daniel and the holy men of Israel, who, believing in His own presence, did not put off the day of salvation from sin, sickness and death to a heavenly future, but showed that all things of evil are unreality now to them that speak the truth. They bring up the testimony of the devout and good in their highest moments of inspiration through all time to corroborate their conclusions.

Not the testimony of the good when disputing their own words, nor the words of the powerful and proud who know not inspiration, but the best and truest words the best hearts have ever spoken, and they are bound by all that is best within them to square their lives by them and base their hopes upon them.

Certain of the faithful have formed themselves into a body with the sole purpose of urging these principles upon an unbelieving and skeptical world. They are so young in their own doctrines and so hard beset by the questionings and criticisms of the churches and schools that they have not been coherent or unanimous upon certain points of doctrine, and in forming this body have subjected themselves to each other’s severest tests, that there may be from henceforth no dissensions or differences, and that what is according to Christian science may be very clearly defined in their minds.

In thus reviewing their relations to true Christian doctrines and practice they have repeated the experience of the early apostles of its first perfect preaching, and in today’s proceedings we see the concluding ceremonies of the examining council of Jerusalem in the year of the first Christian dispensation.

Paul, Peter and Barnabas have preached the full salvation their Lord and Master Jesus Christ had taught them. But some of the converts have opposed the absolutely radical stand taken by Peter and Paul in their free and kindly fellowship with all believers in the Christ doctrine, whether of the Gentile or Jewish world, and their criticisms have been so decided that it has become necessary to know what does and what does not constitute sound doctrine, and who are not to be sustained in their common endeavors to convert the world to Truth. “The liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free” was their decision, and the yoke of the former belief in evil bondage was to be known no more among them. Then they shook hands like loving brethren, and went forth to minister to the world and to martyrdom.

We of the new dispensation have decided in like manner of the true children of the science, we free from all the evil beliefs of the old forms of faith, in whatever guise they may present themselves, whether as Satan of the recognized evangelical church or mesmerism of the later church, and we hereby ask all Christian science workers the world over to give us the right hand of fellowship on the doctrine of freedom from all evil and fearlessness of every evil thing; or thought. We ask the old church to take notice of our ministry that it is apostolic in principle and practice, and we ask it to bid us God speed on our healing mission to a world neglected in full spiritual ministrations. We ask the world, which is to be our church, to turn and listen to our preaching, for it is the quickening message from the Supreme of the universe announcing the second coming long expected, when every mountain of trouble shall be removed, every hill of difficulty obliterated. Pride cannot hold its own where the spiritually taught are speaking, and learning cannot defeat the wisdom of the children of Divine science. Listen, for we will speak of excellent things, and the opening of our lips shall be right things.

As we thus set forth upon this ministry, with the deliberate intention of converting the world to Christian science, we ought to tell somewhat of our relations to those ministrations held in reverence by other ministers of Christian doctrine. The ordinance of the Lord’s Supper, baptism, marriage, and what other observances come in the way of the faithful minister’s calling. In these matters we shall heed Paul’s injunction literally for the present. “Let us give ourselves to the ministry of the Word,” as if our only mission were to be that ministry which the Word itself, faithfully uttered, can carry. The ordinance of the Lord’s Supper has no meaning to thousands of those who partake of the bread and wine which symbolizes the flesh and blood of Christ. But to the trained in Christian science, flesh and blood themselves are only symbolic of the thought and word of the Christ, and if we partake of the word and thought, till we have let the same mind be in us that was in Christ Jesus, our Lord, we have really fulfilled the ordinance of the Lord’s Supper. To this interpretation we shall adhere, and the external forms will in no way be used by us, although their use by the external church is in no way deprecated or depreciated by us. The various forms of baptism used to symbolize the cleansing blood of the Christ have a deeper meaning than the red blood of the bleeding Savior to us. Baptism means the cleansing word of denial of all evil, spoken by the Christ, used, refusing to believe in the fatherhood of any other being but God, the Spirit manifest, refusing to see the evil of the world as reality, judging not according to appearance, but judging the righteous judgment of those translated out of such false beliefs into the white light of truth spoken.

The changeless word of truth shall be our ministry of baptism.