Neville Goddard Lecture, The Bible Your Biography

The Bible Your Biography

Complete Neville Goddard Lecture Audio Available in Members Area

THE BIBLE – YOUR BIOGRAPHY

When I tell you the Bible is your biography, I am actually saying that you are God, and I mean it. We are told in the 82nd Psalm: “I say, ‘You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, you shall die like men, and fall like any prince.” So I mean exactly what the psalmist said: that you are gods. But man has such a strange concept of the word “God.” This morning’s mail brought me a letter. I do not know the lady – she claims she is eighty-two. She said: “I am returning your latest book, The Law and the Promise.” She can’t be returning it to me because I did not sell [it to] her. She may have returned it to my publisher or to some store who sold her the book. She said: “I read the 156 pages, the forty stories told about the promise, and no credit was given to God; not one who received the answer to their prayers thanked God, and so it is a Godless book.” So she is returning it to someone. Do not criticize her. She is eighty-two and undoubtedly like my own mother and father, who had strange and wonderful concepts of God, but God on the outside of themselves. God was on the outside to whom they turned, and she undoubtedly turned to some external creative father and that is her God. If she feels that way about it you can’t blame her when she reads in this, as I have brought the two together and identify God with human imagination. By identifying the two and making them one, I rubbed out the vision that has plagued man. For we are told: “All things were made by him, and without him was not made anything that was made.”

Then we discovered that we could imagine ourselves to be what we want to be and – remaining faithful, remaining loyal to that assumption – it became an external fact in our world. If “all things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made,” and we did this as an experiment and it worked, well then – we discovered God! And he wasn’t some being in space who would return. We found him in ourselves as our wonderful human imagination. That we failed many times – certainly, we are still torn between the concept of God, the father of David, and what we ourselves discovered, so we are still under that influence of an ancient concept of God. So she is going to return the book…and let us all feel that tomorrow she will see who God really is, but don’t judge her – not harshly anyway. Leave her exactly as she is, because at least she believes in God, which is far greater than not to believe in some power that is creative in this world. Now we turn to the Book of Books. You can’t read it by saying: well, I opened the book and read from Genesis to Revelation. There are sixty-six books in what we call the Bible. It’s a library. The Old Testament is something you almost can’t believe – certainly not with sense – without the key given us in the New. The New is completely hidden in the Old and the Old is made manifest in the New. So we turn to the first book, the book of beginning, the Book of Genesis and – listen carefully -we are dealing with a mystery. When I speak of a mystery I am not speaking of a matter that must be kept secret, but a truth that is mysterious in character. And the Book of Genesis has a strange reversal of order right through it: “The first shall be last and the last first.” This reversal of order begins right in the very beginning. Let us see what is first stated in the book. “In the beginning God” – that is the beginning. The end of the book: “In a coffin in Egypt.” “In the beginning God – in a coffin in Egypt.” And the one placed in a coffin is man. Then [he] was called Joseph, and Joseph died. He was 110 years old and he was embalmed and placed in a coffin in Egypt. So here we find the beginning and the end. “I am the beginning and the end. The alpha and omega, the first and the last.” Let us see how the thing unfolds for us. In the first chapter, God’s purpose is stated: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish in the sea, the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps over the earth.” Let us give him dominion – that is God’s purpose, not his creative act as yet.

His creative act comes in the second chapter, but that is God’s purpose, stated: he is going to make man in his own image and give him complete dominion over all things. In the second chapter comes the creative act, and God from the very “dust of the ground made man and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” Now jump from the second chapter, 7th verse, to the 21st verse: there you will find the creative act. He states this in the 7th verse and then completes the creative act from the 21st through the 24th verse. “And God caused a deep sleep to fall upon man and he slept,” and then comes the creative act of the division of man. Male-female he now makes it. Man is not a male; man is not a female – man is the image of God, a being above the organization of sex. But he is destined to be that being, he is not yet completed. To arrive at that level where everything is subject to his creative power, he passes through this divided image of himself, called male-female. Then we are told: in the divided state he is led up into a world of experience. Here was a world of innocence, because here he is dead, so the dead could not in any way be tempted, the grave could not violate anything – it is dead. Yet he is made alive, he is made alive by the sinking of God in himself, for God – don’t forget the last verse: “In a coffin in Egypt”… But the story is, having made the image of himself, the image has no power in itself. It only becomes animate and alive and responsive if God sinks himself in his image. So God sinks himself in his image and in that state the image becomes divided, male-female, as we are. And then comes the most horrible story in the world: that God is in it, that image of himself, the very torment of eternity. It is necessary to take the image that was dead and just made responsive, made alive – but only made alive (which is a responsive state) – and then to turn it into a life-giving being, just by God. So it took the entire story of 6,000 years (called “six days”) to complete the act of God. Here, you and I are the beings. I am not speaking from theory tonight; I am speaking from experience. I tell you the story is true from beginning to end, and if I cannot stand here before you and demonstrate for your own satisfaction the might that is God, it is only because I am still wearing this garment of flesh. And so as long as I am wearing it, the glory of the heavenly inheritance cannot be actualized by me, or at least is not fully realized in me while I wear and continue to wear this garment of flesh. But everything said in the Bible I have experienced. I have experienced the depths of my soul and it is all true from beginning to end.

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