Esoteric V10: July 1896 - Iapsop.com

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self to them, nor ~erve th~m : for I who will be thy Power am
a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the Fathers upon the
t·bildren unto the thit·d and fourth generation of them that bateme:
and shewing mercy un~ thousands of them that love me,
and keep my commandments."
This part of the covenant has been very lightly paRsed over
hy all classes of religious thinkers. They have relegate.l the
whole subject to the heathen custom of making images of their
gods, and bowing down and worshiping them. W bile the words •
.. Thou shalt not make untn thee any graven image, or any likeness
of anything ett•.," 1n that intt>rpretation
ha~~ a. dt>eper Kig!Jitit~ation than merely the image itself.
The heathen who made the:;e images knew fnll well that there
Wall no power or efficacy in the sub~tanue of the image, hut that
it only served to rept·esent a thought of an invisible and spit·itual
mentality anti pow•·•·· The stutl•·nt. of :\1.' thology knows
that by those images Wt>t'e r·epr·t•s:•ntetl evt>t'Y attr·ihnte active in
human life; that i:; to sa,\', thet·e were imageR rept·eRenting the
god of wealth, llygeia, the gotlcless of health, Vtmus, the gotldeRs
of the love pa.'lsion, Pan, the gn•l of Rude len di11aster atul
confusion, and so a long list of pritwiples were nam~l and
imagecl forth hy the people who knew not Yahwlr.
God's wot·tls, "Ot· any likenes,; of anything that is in tlu~
heaven above etc.," are onl.v ex planatm·y of what i~ really emb()(lied
in the declaration, "Thon Khalt uot make unto thee
any graven ima~e: " for he would have his people know, and
not only believe in, hut !'ouficle in him as the source of all power,
~the source of all good as well aK of all so-called evil. He
RllYR hy Isaiah (XLV. 7): •· I form the lig-ht, and cre11te !larkness:
I make peace, and create evil. I. Yahveh, do all these
things.'' Thus he not only gnar!ls again:;t the mind of man
reaching out to the. gods of the heathen for good, but also
against the ·belief in the l'xisterwe of any other power in the
universe but that of the (iocl of hrael. The statement is emvhatie,
"Thou hast ct·eate!l all thiug" for· thy plea.'lure, and for
thy pleasure they are and wer·e created ..,
•
lie also repeats many times throughout the prophecias that.
)lt' is t.he only power in the nni verse. The following are a few
Digitized by Coogle