The Purpose of Life
The Seven Steps To The Heavens
By Gerald J Lane
The Bible is the most prolific of all sacred books and is available in virtually every language. It sells more copies than any other book and has done since printing was invented. More people believe it is divinely inspired and follow its teachings than any other holy book and I am one of them.
I read it front to back when I first got it, but had to admit that I understood little of it. Read it again in the ‘Bible in a Year’ version, which was better, but it still felt I was just turning over the bits of a jigsaw. Occasionally I managed to fit a few bits together but I still did not have any idea what the picture on the lid was.
I bought books that told me how to do this and be that, but they seemed to be narrow insights and did not help me to see any bigger picture. I was a member of The Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship International, spoke in tongues and moved in the Gifts of the Spirit, with signs and wonders following. But I still could not see the picture, nor had I met anyone else who could. As long as you believed in the Trinity, that Jesus died for your salvation you would go to Heaven and it did not matter whether you did or did not do anything.
‘No one can come to the Father except through Jesus’. All other religions are false and worthless. If so why, did God Almighty let them get started knowing it would condemn billions to Hell? Other religions have always challenged the divinity of Jesus and the Christians have just said we believe he is. Not having an answer to them, while rubbishing their religion has led to wars costing millions of lives. This booklet explains why Jesus has to be taken as divine, but that it is wrong to condemn all other religions as worthless.
Over twenty years ago I was teaching in a difficult boy’s school. One day which had gone well, ending with me praying for a boy and seeing God heal him. I then went on to visit my mother. I did some cleaning, shopping and cooked a meal, ending with hugs and kisses. I then went on to a Jewish widow and fixed some problems in her home.
On driving home I suddenly realised how tired I was and that it was hardly surprising. I thought it would be nice to know if God appreciated it. So I decided to ask Him how His day had been, which would then lead onto mine. So I started, “Dad it’s me. How has your day been?” “The same as always” came the reply. "Today hundreds of my sons have been killed in pointless wars. Many of my daughters raped and tens of thousands of my little children allowed to die because you cannot share the food I have provided”. I had not realised how personal these things were to God.
In the face of such anguish I felt angry and stupid for wanting a pat on the head. I shouted at Him” Why are you telling me? What can I do about it”? Gently He reminded me how when my daughter was just four years old and I had come home from a hard day, she would run to greet me and throw her arms around my neck and kiss me. I remembered. Then He said “Did I remember how the problems of the day seemed to disappear?” I said I did but what was He suggesting. That I should give Him a hug? “Yes” He said “Most of my children run and hide if I come close. They think I will be angry with them”.
I said that I did not know how to hug Him but that I would join my hands on the top of the steering wheel and imagine they were around His neck. Then I told Him that I loved Him and kissed Him. If you have never thought about doing this let me encourage you, for today has been just as bad as all the others for God. I did not get the pat on the head but I did learn how important each one of us can be to God.
I was quite happy being a child of God when a few years later, at a prayer meeting, we were encouraged to ask for something from God. The thought came into my mind and I asked to be able to look at people as Jesus did. I did not realise that it would start me on a spiritual journey that would take nearly fifteen years.
People with problems started coming into our lives. My wife and I treated them as if they were Jesus always trying to give them the best help we could. The problems got bigger and the cost of loving was a struggle, on just a teacher’s salary, but God kept us afloat.
Then I started visiting prisoners as part of a Christian rehabilitation program, called ‘Kairos’. I visited the prisoners every week, going down into their association area just outside of their cells. Right from the beginning I felt love towards these men, some of whom had done things as bad as is possible to do. I do not know how I got passed their crimes; they just did not seem to register with me.
Looking back I can see that the people God had asked me to love would have appeared to be increasingly unlovable. The worse they were the more love God had to give me to deliver.
One other person God gave me was a seller of the Big Issue. He was not exactly homeless but was needing love. He has Asperges’ Syndrome, which while making him highly intelligent, (a PhD in Philosophy plus degrees in Mathematics and English) he found relationships with people very hard. He studied the Bible in the original languages and had many books of antiquity.
I asked God that while I was helping him he would help me. He lent me books, that I had never heard of, but which caused me to look at what we now think of as Christianity with concern. Rick Joyners’ prophetic books and the teaching of J.C. Hedgecock in ’My Sheep Hear My Voice’, convinced me the church was way off track.
Shortly after this, one evening as I was waiting to go into Prison, God said to me that He did not want me to be his child any more but now wanted me to be His lover. I was shocked and told Him so, as I thought of Him as a man and to be His lover would be extremely hard for me and I would need help.
That very night, on the way home, a radio programme mentioned a book written 1370 by Recluse called Julian of Norwich. It was called ‘Revelations of Divine Love’. She had probably been in Holy Orders before becoming a Recluse. In her solitude she reached out to God for help in loving Jesus. She got a number of specific revelations that revealed the very personal and intimate relationship that He desired. When I had ordered the book it had said in the bookshops listings that it was the most significant book, after the Bible, to have been written. Well it was to me.
She had asked God to reveal to her how much Jesus had suffered on the cross so that she could know how much He loved her. What she was shown was so bad that she regretted asking it. Undeterred, I asked God, was there something I could learn from the cross.
Suddenly I was the roman soldier angry with Jesus for getting us up early and wasting our time marching to Herod’s palace and back, for nothing. I was trying to get Jesus to take my anger, by crying out, but he would not. Even when I pulled some of his beard out and drove a crown of thorns into his head, he would not. So I grabbed his arms and pulled him over a table, for the flogging.
I wanted to be able to see his face and feel him flinch. But what I saw in his face was love for me, even after what I had done. I knew it was love as it brought back memories of my mother. I could see her face and feel the love. I had just been shown, by Jesus, 'how he looked at someone', as their mother would.
I started looking at the prisoners, as if I was their mother. The same with my brothers and sisters in the church and even people in the street. They all were loveable. God had already answered my question on how He, so big could relate to me, so small. He had explained that first I had to imagine His personality stretching from the East to the West.
Then explained that He had made each one of us unique and if we stand shoulder to shoulder, in one straight line, we alsowould stretch from the East to the West. He now added that we are meant to love each other and that love would make us one. The one would then be an image of himself.
John’s Gospel starts with ‘In the beginning was the word’. But before that was a beginning where there was just God Almighty, God All Knowing, God All Loving and God All Alone! Being all alone and with no one to love was unbearable. His solution to this problem is us. That we exist is because God Almighty decided we needed to.
How we evolved was planned and our brains made bigger than ‘Evolution’ would have done, so that we had the capacity to love. How we live in family and society groups was all planned for us to have a framework to learn how to love.
Our first lesson is ‘What love is and that we are loveable’ and is taught to us by our Mothers, with some help from Dads and Grandparents. The second is that as we grow up we start to realise our parents have to love us. So we start to look for someone who will choose to want our love and to love us. When we meet them we find this love is more personal and intimate, so we leave our parents. The third lesson is when we have children and just know that we would die to save them. That is meant to be the common experience from which we can start from.
The opening words of the Bible have been a constant subject of debate and division and so it was meant to be as it was written by Moses, who spent days alone with God. It was written with two objectives, the first to put God in the frame, right at the beginning and the second to be sufficiently confusing to allow it to be discounted. The reason for doing so is that God wants us to be able to choose to believe in Him and His desire to have a personal and loving relationship with us, like in lesson two.
With this in mind, let us consider what the Bible was written for. It tells us that our time on Earth will be relatively brief but it will affect our life in Heaven, which will be for ever. By Heaven we should understand that it is not so much a place but those that populate it that makes it Heaven (and part of why it will be so beautiful is because you will be there.) in the same way that the Church is the congregation and not the building.
Therefore the whole purpose of creation is about how we can become one of those who populate Heaven. Would it make sense for God to start this instruction book on how to get there with a description of the order in which scenery, props and costumes were made?
Shakespeare declared that the world was a stage and we are all players. He never started any of his plays by describing how the scenery was made and neither did God. When you try to understand it literally the order of light before the Sun does not make sense. However, when light is understood to be knowledge and in particular that about love and the Sun to be the source of that love, which we believe to be Jesus, the order does make sense.
Believing that God physically made the world, just before the date that Genesis was thought to have been traced back to, has become a matter of faith for many Christians. Even though the scientific evidence of the physical appearance of creation around 6 billion years ago is very strong.
Because God is outside of time, the difference between the two is irrelevant. His point of view is, that the play really started after He came down to personally teach what love was to man (Adam). Which may well have happened around the latter. Genesis has a passage that the ‘Sons of God married the daughters of man’.
John makes it clear that son ship of God is in a spiritual dimension. The gap between the start of creation and the start of the real purpose of creation was necessary for God to avoid being so close to creation that there would be no room for doubt.
It would then make it impossible for us to have the freedom to choose to love God, which is the whole purpose for creation. I hope that after reading this you will understand how to get closer to God and how beautiful and desirable you are to Him,
The first five books of the Bible where written down by Moses, who having been given the Ten Commandments personally by God, included the existing sacred teachings under their new light that God had revealed to him. He must have been instructed to add some measure of confusion as well as hidden meanings.
Josephus, a contemporary of Jesus, wrote a ‘History of The Jews’. He was an exceptional scholar, for while being only fourteen years of age, he was being consulted by the High Priests for understandings of the law of Moses,. He said this of the law. ‘On some things Moses wrote wisely but enigmatically (in code) and on others under a decent allegory and on other such things as requires a direct explication plainly and expressly.’
These would have been the factual details of names, times and places. Moses had used allegories like types of plants and animals to describe the character of humans, because language at the time did not have abstract words to do so. We still describe a man as ‘an oak or a horse’ to mean how strong he is.
The darkness that covered the Earth referred to how man would be born into spiritual darkness and unaware of the existence of God. When light, that is the understanding of love, came into the world it would enable mankind to believe in God, who is love. Those who chose to believe were called light and could then be separated from those who did not, who remained as darkness.
He also alluded to a theory as to why Moses also wrote some of it in a code, but we have no record of what he thought that theory was. However as we are now a further two thousand years on in God’s plan and have a much greater understanding of human behavior, it is possible to see what that theory could have been.
What follows is my attempt to explain what that theory might be, using such revelations as have been shown to me and probably to others. One of whom I believe was a more recent, scholar called Swedenborg. He searched the books after Genesis to see how the words used to describe creation were being used to describe human characteristics.
By applying their meanings it can be seen that God started the Bible by explaining how mankind could go through a process of change in order to be able to reach the purpose of creation, The Seven Steps to the Heavens.
Everything that is, starts with an end in mind and everything between them is just the means to that end. What we think of as creation, from its beginning up to this day, which isn’t the end, is only the means to get what God is wanting at the end.
In most religions there is a common belief that after death our spirit will go on to another existence that is not part of our known creation and what goes on there is closer to the end. Therefore there must be something about our time on Earth, that we have to go through, that helps us to be able to play our part in the end, which will happen in what we call heaven.
For the Bible to be significant, it must be about our time on Earth and what is meant to happen to us in readiness for what is going to happen in heaven. In Genesis the six days or periods of time are so many consecutive states in man's transformation. For man to need to be transformed and not just made in the final state God is revealing that He wants us to choose to change.
To do that we would have to have the freedom to change and a mind that can make a considered choice to change, rationality. This is something that is at the heart of humanity, The Freedom to Speak. Any society that takes away the freedom to choose or does not allow the pursuit of knowledge is in direct conflict with the whole purpose of creation.
Although any choosing may appear to have been made within our body it is in fact made in our spirit, for when our body dies our spirit is released and goes to the place in heaven that corresponds to the state that our spirit had attained while on Earth.
The steps can be understood as we see the changes in a person’s rationality, which is based on how they perceive themselves and therefore make decision on what they think, say and do.
It is inevitable that you will have a good idea at which step you are on. Do not get into self judgement, just read it to the end where a pearl awaits you. You can choose to move to any higher level and God will help you to get there. You will find that instead of feeling negative about yourself you will come to see that you are far more wonderful, glorious and beautiful than you could ever imagine.
The Theory
The following are the six days or ages of human development. They all relate to man’s spirit but are evident in the state of their mind as they see themselves.
The 'First State' is the one into which we are all born. It has at its root the desire to survive. To do this it is necessary to get as much as you can for yourself, even at the expense of others. This is what Darwin called the survival of the fittest.
This state is devoid of true love and it is called a void, emptiness, and thick darkness, where man does not believe in the existence of a God or God’s desire for a personal relationship with Him.
He is nothing to God and his 'rationality' is, I am a body and I want to please my five senses as much as I can and I live only for the day. Because there is no afterlife, there are no consequences and so I can do it even at the expense of others. When man dies in this state he goes to a place where God is not and there is no opportunity to have a relationship with Him.
And the first movement, which is the Lord's mercy, is 'the Spirit of God hovering over the face 2 of the waters'. (Gen1 v ) God wants us to change so He put love into the world. His Spirit works through the unconditional love of our parents to encourage us to believe that we are loveable.
Even if we have the best parents in the world there comes a time when we have to venture into the ‘real’ world. Here we encounter other children who may be equally loved. They like us are in the first state and are thinking only about themselves. We are expecting others to see how loveable we are but are not prepared to see how loveable the other children are.
Now there is confusion in our mind, are we loveable or are we not. We may make some friends who help us to feel something but it does not come even close to our mother’s love. That is at its best.
But many have poorer experiences due to circumstances that are out of their control. Broken homes, poverty and bereavement can leave a child feeling unloved and therefore unaware of how loveable they truly are. Society does not help judging their reaction to these feelings as antisocial. Not feeling special themselves it is hardly surprising that they do not see others as special. So preying on them does not seem so inappropriate.
Without someone loving them unconditionally, it is impossible for them to get out of this state. Only true love can penetrate the darkness to illuminate the loveliness that is in every person.
People in this state are predominantly selfish and they use everyone to make themselves feel good. On the surface they may even appear to love someone but when that person fails to make them happy they are quite prepared to abandon them.
True love is when you want to make someone else happy, more than yourself. If you have never been truly loved you will never have experienced this in action. You can learn that by doing things that make someone feel special will make you become special to them. Feeling special may be the best you have ever felt and so you continue to do things in order to enhance the feeling of being special.
This is not true love because you are thinking about what you are going to get out of what you doing. If it was true love you would have to accept that they also want to make you happy. So each would have to allow the other to be responsible for making them happy.
Every act that you do to make yourself happy would be stealing a chance for them to feel happy by doing it for you. Such selfish love is an indicator of self love which is the opposite of true love.
Many relationships fail because one, usually the man, does things that they claim are indications of their love but which they really do because it makes them feel good. Working hard to get status and then using the money to buy a big house does not make someone feel loved.
They may indeed have few opportunities to show their love and certainly do not feel as if their love was being depended upon to make the other happy. They are therefore denied the chance to feel happy and see this as proof that they are not loved.
However love is not a feeling based on what is inside you. It is an act of your will and requires you to put nothing before it. When your will is set to love or receive love then love will flow into you and it will start to change the person you love and your regeneration has started.
The 'Second State' is when a distinction is made between the things that are the Lord's and those that are man's own. Those which are the Lord's are called in the Word remnants', and here they are chiefly the cognition's of faith (trust in love) which a person has learned since they were a small child.
Such faith is based on the unconditional love of their parents. At the point when the child feels that the love of their parents is no longer sufficient they start to seek a higher love where they will have to be prepared to give love and receive love equally. Childhood friendships help in this transition as they are freely entered into and cause them to make concessions, as opposed to just doing what they want to do.
After experiencing God’s love through their parents, friends and a partner they are then expected to start caring about others outside of their family and friendship group. They believe that the good they do comes from within themselves.
The concept of ‘the brotherhood of mankind’ being a commonly held belief. Only now are they a part of humanity. Albeit as a 'natural man' and their 'rationality' is based on morality with acts of kindness to prove to themselves that they are a nice person.
They may well do things that appear amazingly sacrificial but their motive is still not love. They do not disbelieve in God but have not entered into any relationship with Him. Provided that there is no hatred in them for anyone and their lives have pretty much followed the Ten Commandments, or similar, it is possible that they will go to a heaven where they will get the chance to start one. While on Earth they will still seek their happiness through their senses but there will be a battle going on between the selfish and the caring for what makes them most happy.
The third state is one of believing in God and of repentance that opens up the opportunity of a relationship with Him. In this state they may speak piously and devoutly from their internal man and brings forth goods, like charitable acts, These are nevertheless inanimate, since they are limited, because he imagines that they originate in himself and are indistinguishable to acts of charity by those still in the second state. However as he continues to do more acts of charity he is called a tender plant (something visible that a change has started), giving hope, then a seed bearing plant (pointing people in the right direction) and finally a fruit tree (leading other people into a relationship with God). He is a man spirit and his rationality is that he is a man with a spirit, which when he dies, will go to heaven. This is available to followers of all religions. When he dies he will go to a heaven for those whose knowledge was paramount. He will still seek happiness through his senses and may even ask God to help provide it.
The fourth state is when he is moved by love and enlightened by faith. Previous to this he did indeed utter pious words and bring forth good deeds. But he did so from a state of repentance to temptation and anguish. Often caused by “Hell and Brimstone” preaching. Now from faith in God’s love for him and charity, he takes God’s love to those who need it. Therefore the latter are now kindled in his internal man, and are called the two great lights. This state requires him to see that there is no good in his natural self and only by humbling himself is it possible for God to do something through him, thus revealing the source of the love. He is a spirit man and his rationality is that he is a spirit inside a body and to some extent is already a part of heaven. When he dies he will go to a heaven for those for whom revealing God’s love to people was paramount. He is less interested in pleasing his senses and is prepared to make sacrifices in his natural desires.
The fifth state is when he speaks from faith in God’s love for all and God’s readiness to prove it, with ‘signs and wonders’ following. In so doing he confirms himself in truth and good. What he brings forth at this point are animate, because they are no longer limited and are called the fish of the sea and the birds of the air. He is a spirit and his rationality is that he is just a spirit and sees through spiritual eyes and everything in the world is God and therefore love in revelation.( Like a mother preparing a special meal is really a revelation of her love) He finds that his joy is in seeing God’s love reaching out through him to others. He is prepared to make great sacrifices for them. Such people are often missionaries.
The sixth state is when he utters truths and performs good deeds from faith, arising from love. Acts of charity performed under God’s guidance lead to an increasing understanding of the power of love and a great spiritual harvest. What he brings forth at this point are called a living creature and a beast, because the man no longer can control it. And because at this point he starts to act from faith and also simultaneously from love, he becomes a spiritually harmonious man, loving all his Christian brothers. He is now able to love his brother as he loves himself because he sees himself as one with him. The unity of love joins all the brethren to make their witness large enough to be called an image. His rationality is that he feels that he is one with all his Christian brothers loving them without distinction of the divisions seen in the natural state. He does not see any possessions as his own as he does not differentiate between others and himself.
The seventh state is one that we will only be able to reach at the end, as it is what God intends to do with us in Heaven. When God considered what man would be like, He only had himself as a reference. God had already showed me everyone standing shoulder to shoulder and together they would equate to Him. He made everyone different by dividing Himself into a myriad of bits. Each bit being beautiful. However I believe that all things on Earth relate to Heaven. Therefore as our understanding of the greatest happiness is to be married to someone who we love and who loves us equally, then that is what God wants. He wants someone to love who is of relatively equal to himself and who has freely chosen to love Him. He solved the problem of how we as a bit can love Him as a whole by revealing Himself in bit size. So that we can then choose to love that which we are equitable to, Jesus. He has to be acknowledged as God for our choice to love Him to be acceptable to God. His bride will be the one body that is made up of those, from this level and from the whole Church, with Jesus at its head. God is expecting them to really desire an intimate and personal relationship with Him, even longing to be with Him, as He is with Her. God sees you as a beautiful bit of His bride. But you can only become part of the bride by loving everyone.
You can easily be one of the children or you can go for the pearl and be part of His beautiful Bride!!
An extract from Swedenborg’s Arcana Caelestia Vol.1 ( Divine Wisdom) with some additional explanations taken from some of his other books.