Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 4, sect. 1308

1308. "The Old Testament", with its accounts of war and heroic warlords, kings and prophets, is thus a piece of "psychology" told as "world history". Through this account the history of the "Jewish people" has become an "object lesson" for the whole of the rest of the world. The life and mode of existence of this people, its errors, religious belief and attitude constitute in principle the same life, the same mode of existence, the same errors and mistakes that all other people in the world coming after the "Jewish people" must of necessity experience. The fate of the "Jews" is the absolutely inevitable fate of all terrestrial human beings. The idea of being "God's chosen people", being a kind of "master race" on Earth is a common characteristic of all peoples, of all races, of every nation or state at a given juncture in their history, just as the idea of being "specially favoured" by the Godhead or of being in the Godhead's "good graces" is something that the single individual at a given juncture in its passage through the spiral cycle must also inevitably succumb to. The "biblical object lesson" in the form of the history of the "Jewish people", combined with the fate that we in recent centuries have seen become the lot of this people as a nation and race, has become a staggering demonstration of the fact that "pride goeth before a fall". The fate, existence and appearance of this people have been a continuous "wandering in the desert". But this "desert" has expanded to constitute the entire world. Scattered, mocked and persecuted, driven out of their own country by the "wild tribes and hordes of the desert", the "heathen peoples", the nations in the rest of the world that the "Jewish people", in its previous superstitious pride, had considered itself far superior to, we find the "Jewish people" again degraded to being almost nothing but a "pariah" or "outcast", whose racial designation has become a term of abuse for any "shameless businessman", "moneylender" or "financial swindler". In truth, is this gospel of "The Old Testament" not an urgent warning to the present-day peoples of the entire world to take care? Are the divine words handed down to us not one single great "object lesson": "Let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall"? What is the modern world otherwise to do with this thousands-of-years-old gospel, with its accounts of a people's superstition, its very egoistic self-worship, its wars, degradation and exile promoted by more or less war-loving and conquest-loving prophets and vindictive high priests, Pharisees and scribes? Is it not so that all these characters recur in all the subsequent states and peoples? Indeed, is not the history that the so-called modern nations have experienced up to this very day in principle a more or less advanced true copy of the history and fate of the Jewish people? Is there any present-day state that has not had "Pharisees", intolerant "scribes" and "high priests", a "Caiaphas", a "Judas" and a "Barabbas"? Is there any present-day nation that has not crucified a "Jesus of Nazareth", which in this case means the ideals of "internationalism", in the belief that in so doing the altar of "nationalism" or selfishness could be fortified? Did the overwhelming might of the modern superpowers of today not come into existence at one time more or less because they thought they had the right to conquer or occupy precisely those terrains, territories and peoples that today make them superpowers? But the thought of conquering and occupying even a very small part of another people's rightful territory constitutes of course the "idea of a master race". What people or individual is completely free of this idea? Indeed, this idea is very deeply ingrained in all living beings at terrestrial mankind's present stage in the spiral cycle. The "idea of a master race", the belief in having the right to conquer terrains and peoples by force, the idea of being "God's chosen people" is not a characteristic particular to the Jewish people or any other nation, state or race, just as it does not constitute a characteristic particular to any single individual either. It is, on the contrary, an intrinsic, specific characteristic of a particular step on the ladder of evolution. It is an inevitable consequence of the ignorance and lack of experience of the laws of life that define this step. Absolutely all peoples and all individuals must go though the experience of this ignorance and superstition and the effects they have on the formation of their fate. How could pride otherwise "come before a fall" and the ensuing wisdom arise?