Dictionary of all Scriptures & Myths

MOSES, THE SERVANT OF GOD

A symbol of the rational and ethical nature, which formulates laws of conduct under penalties for non-observance and disobedience. The moral nature is the law-giver and the conserver of the higher nature (God).

“By Moses is meant, in an extensive sense, all the law written in his five books, and, in a more confined sense, the law which is called the decalogue (ten commandments).” – Swedenborg, Apocalypse Revealed, n. 662.

“But unto this day, whensoever Moses is read, a veil lieth upon their heart. But whensoever a man shall turn to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now the Lord is the Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. But we all, with unveiled face reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit.” – 2 Cor. iii. 15–18.

When conduct is governed by ethical considerations only, without love, the veil of the lower nature precludes a vision of the higher in the inner heart of man. But when a mind turns to the God within, the veil of the lower nature is removed, and the Divine Love of the Spirit is perceived as an ideal; and where the heart is tender, and the love of right and truth active, there is liberty: for conduct is no longer coerced by moral laws, but follows gladly the teaching of the Spirit. And so it will come about that at the end of the cycle, when the lower nature is transcended, the soul will reflect clearly the Divine attributes and become the image of its Lord, passing from stage to stage upward to bliss.

“This is the normal condition of all souls, that they be filled with God, acted by God, holding their will in His, irradiated always by His all-supporting life. This it is that constitutes the radical idea of religion, and differs it from a mere ethical virtue. God is the prime necessity of all religious virtue. The necessity is constituent, not penal. … Religious character is God in the soul, and without that all pretenses of religious virtue are, in fact, atheistic.” – H. Bushnell, Nature, etc., p. 163.

“St. John’s position is that the law was given by Moses for a time, until grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. Moses is treated almost as a forerunner.” – W. R. Inge, Camb. Bibl. Essays, p. 263.

“The feeling of ethical obligation is as real, as undeniable, as is the fact of sense-perception. As surely as consciousness reveals to me, in the ordinary exercise of my faculties, myself, and an objective world not myself, so surely does it reveal to me, through the feeling of moral obligation, a Higher than I, to whom that obligation binds me. This Kant deemed the surest revelation of the Divine. ‘Ethic,’ he writes, ‘issues inevitably in religion, by extending itself to the idea of a sovereign moral Lawgiver, in whose will that is the end of creation, which at the same time can be, and ought to be, man’s chief end.’ And here the great philosopher of these latter days does but express, in his own language, what has been delivered, in divers manners, by the world’s spiritual teachers of all creeds, in all ages.” – W. S. Lilly, The Great Enigma, p. 306.

“The birth of the power of recognizing and dealing with ideas, the birth of ideality is an epoch in the history of the world or of man.” – Phillips Brooks, Mystery of Iniquity, p. 94.

See Also

ANGER OF GOD
ARK (bul.)
ARK (test.)
CHRIST'S SECOND COMING
DISPENSATIONS
HOUSE OF BONDAGE
IMAGE OF GOD
JOHN BAPTIST
LAW OF MOSES
MIRROR
MOSAIC
READING
ROCK (spiritual)
SHOES PUT OFF
TABERNACLES
TESTAMENT
WOMAN (adultery)
WRATH OF GOD