Chapter 17 - The I Was and the I Am

[God in Man’s Image]

According to the original Christian teaching (as I understand it), all undesirable conditions and circumstances are constituted by illusions that are held by ignorant, immature minds, and that project on to the bodily or material plane what may be compared to shadows. “If thine eye be single” -- that is, if thy view be true, if thy understanding of life be sound, -- “thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness.” Undesirable experiences are the darkness wherein a person walks and works and stumbles about, whose notion of the universe, instead of shedding light on the meaning of life, casts on it a shadow. They are the effects produced on the field of our senses, by mistaken thought on the main issues of life, by a misunderstanding of life, by believing, and therefore practicing, a lie. The stuff they are woven of is something like the unsubstantial kind of stuff that makes up nightmares. They are the sort of thing from which Truth, thoroughly known, can set people free.

-- J. Bruce Wallace.

Some one has said that “an honest man is the noblest work of God.” Ten thousand thousand others have repeated his little speech -- with a solemn wag of the head and sidewise squinting which conveyed the opinion that God is chary of his noble works.

Then there came another man who paraphrased that. “An honest God is the noblest work of man,” he said. And a thousand or so of us wondered why we hadn’t thought to say that! Why, of course. And the other thousands of thousands lifted up their hands and cried, “Blasphemy -- stone him, stone him -- put him out of the church, where the bogies‘ll get him!” They put him out. But the bogies haven’t got him. And many of the thousands are taking up his cry -- “An honest God is the noblest work of man.”

Why not? An honest God is of greater value than many honest men, is he not? God is the creator of man; unless God is himself honest his honest man is but an accident, instead of an image and likeness of himself.

But, according to the paraphraser, man creates his God. Well, that is a paraphrase only, and true only in a sense.

God is. Man’s creation of God is simply his mental concept of God; it is God as he sees him, or it, from his viewpoint.

An honest God is the concept of a man whose soul recognizes honesty and loves it. A God of power is the mental creation of him whose soul recognizes and loves power. A God of love is the mental creation of him who recognizes and loves love. A God of vengeance is the mental concept of him who loves vengeance.

Perhaps you think your mental concept of God is not so very important, since it is all in your mind and the real God is what he is regardless of your idea of him. But it matters vitally to you.

It is not God as he really is, that is creating you; but God as he appears to you. Your concept of God is creating you in its own image and likeness.

If you think of God as a great man on a throne, with a long white heard and an eye-foran- eye-and-a-tooth-for-a-tooth expression, you may depend upon being made over into a sour-visaged decrepit old man who will want to die and get away from it all.

If you think of God as a God of power, love, wisdom, beneficence, you will aim to be perfect as he is perfect.

If you happen to be one of the fools who has said in his heart there is no God, your life will be a crazy patchwork and your end that of the stoic who defies earth to do its worst by him; which it probably will, being a willing earth and ready to give each according to his demands.

You are being created in the image and likeness of the Lord your God, the God enthroned in your heart.

What kind of a God is in your heart? Is he small and revengeful and capricious, a sort of policeman to tell your troubles to, to receive consolation from, and by whom to send punishment to your enemies?

Or is your God the Principle and Substance behind all creation, the power, wisdom, love, of all creation, a God who loves all, is just to all, generous to all, favors none?

But no matter how lofty a God you carry in your heart he will do you little good unless he is an "I Am" God.

Most men’s Gods are “I Was” Gods. They believe God did wonderful things for the children of Israel; that he performed great miracles for the apostles and disciples of Jesus; but to this age they think of him as merely the I Was God, who stands aloof and lets man run things -- man and the devil, or “malicious animal magnetism.”

Believers in the “I Was” God are also great sticklers for the “I Shall Be” God, who is coming again to judge the wicked and set up his kingdom on earth. And these believers in the I Shall Be God think that their only business in life is to wait around until the great I Shall Be makes his appearance.

People who worship the “I Was” and the “I Shall Be” are never demonstrators. Between admiration of the “I Was” and anticipation of the “I Shall Be” they fall to the ground and -- wait for the I Shall Be in themselves and others.

Only the “I Am” God does things. “I Am” love impels you to love now. “I Am” wisdom inspires you to act upon your ideas. “I Am” power performs miracles, not yesterday or tomorrow, but now.

I Am God is the God who works to-day, in you and in me. His ways are not the ways of the I Was God, nor of the I Shall Be God; they are the ways of the “I Am” -- new, different, the ways of to-day, not of yesterday or to-morrow.

I know a dear woman who worships the I Was and the I Shall Be. She entertained Schlatter the healer, and was firmly convinced that he was a literal reincarnation of Jesus Christ. She took Schlatter’s word for it. She also accepted his excuses for not immediately setting up a literal kingdom here on earth, as described in the book of Revelations. He told her he had other work to do just now, that he was going away, but would soon return and establish a literal kingdom. She swallowed it all -- without a single chew. Schlatter went away, and later a body was found in the mountains which was said to be his.

Since Schlatter’s disappearance some years ago, this lady has spent her time in writing about him and looking for his return. The I Was and the I Shall Be absorb her entire spiritual attention.

In the meantime she lives in a small mining town where in the life surging about her she sees no God. Not long ago she wrote me to help her speak the Word of freedom for a man on trial for his life. She said he was absolutely innocent and that a “terrible conspiracy” existed against him. The man was condemned to die, still protesting, not innocence but self-defense. It was a case of mix-up with two men and a woman, followed by a drunken brawl and the usual plea of “didn’t mean to.”

This lady’s sympathies were all with the man, and her letters to me were pitiful. Her heart was wrung with agony for him and his bereaved wife, and convulsed with horror and impotent rage at the “wickedness” of the “wretches who falsely swore away his life.” The way “evil” triumphed over justice was awful, she said, and she knew when Schlatter returned justice would be done and the wicked wretches annihilated -- or words to that effect.

You see, she has no conception of an "I Am" God, who rules now. She sits in judgment on men’s acts and prays to Schlatter to come back and set things right.

She remembers that the "I Was" put 10,000 to flight with Gideon’s three hundred pitchers and candles -- simply sneaked up and scared them into a panic. She knows the "I Was" hardened the heart of Pharaoh to lie repeatedly to the Israelites. She knows the devil had to ask permission of God before he tempted Job. She knows God said “I make peace and I create evil,” and that “The Lord hath made all things himself; yea, even the wicked for the day of evil.” She knows that “Whatsoever the Lord pleased that did he in heaven, and in earth, in the seas, and all the deep places.” She knows all these things of the Great I Was.

But that the I Am works now in the hearts of men; that God now hardens one heart to perjury and another to truth, one to murder and another to lay down his life that his friend may live; -- that God now works in these apparently antagonistic ways and thereby works out perfect justice, wisdom, love, has never entered her mind.

She cannot imagine that no man meets any form of death until he himself has ripened for that particular form of death. She has read that eighteenth chapter of Ezekiel, where God explains that every man dies for his own sins, not for the false swearings of another. But the great “I Was” said that, and the “I Shall Be” says it; but the “I Am” is absent -- so she thinks.

Somewhere in the Old Testament -- in Psalms, I think -- the statement is made that those who die are “taken away from the evil to come.” I opine that this is literally and unvaryingly true, that death never comes except as the dying one needed relief from worse things than death, things which lay straight ahead in his path.

The man of whom this friend wrote me deserved his death; if not for the specific act for which he was tried, then for other thoughts and acts which preceded that. The man was on the wrong road -- a road of many and increasing evils. Death took him off the road at the right time, and gave him a better start in some other state of existence.

I must either believe this or deny the “I Am” God’s power, wisdom or omnipresence. I must accept God’s wisdom, power, love and presence on faith; or my own judgment on sight.

As I know from experience that appearances are deceitful, and that my personal judgment must perforce be based almost entirely upon appearances, I prefer to hold fast my faith in the presence, power, wisdom and love of the God over all. Therefore I deny that this man suffered an untimely death for the vindictiveness and perjury of others; I believe he died as a result of a mental constitution and tendencies which are hidden from me, but not from the I Am.

I believe it was the spirit of the I Am moving upon the face of his soul-deeps and saying, “Let there be light,” which gave him his experiences and his particular form of death. And I believe his soul goes marching on to greater light -- freed from the burdens of wrong habits of mind and body which were contracted in the old life of ignorance.

Oh, yes, it is easy to believe thus of one I never saw. It is not quite so easy to apply the same principle in the lives of those near and dear to me, and in my own life. But I aim to do it, even in the smallest details of living; and I am daily growing in the ability to acknowledge the "I Am" God in all my ways. I know this is the only way to live the new thought.