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What is the Relevance of the Old Testament?
I hope you have settled well into the new year!
So far we have been discussing the basic concepts of Gnosticism. With this understanding as background it is wonderful to look at the traditional scriptures with new eyes. For me personally reading the traditional scriptures in their true context is in itself a Tikkune healing.
In Judaic tradition, the Torah, or law, is the first five books of the Old Testament from Genesis to Deuteronomy. Following are the writings and the prophets that form the rest of the Old Testament. As one reads and studies the Old and the New Testaments, one cannot help but be struck by the radical difference there appears to be between conceptions of God. In fact, if one did not know better, one might feel that these two parts of the Bible represents the revelation of two different Gods. In the Sophian tradition of Gnostic Christianity, however, it is not God who changes between the Old and New Testaments. Rather, it is human being and the prophets who have matured and who have spiritually evolved to see, hear, and know the divine revelation more directly and clearly.
However, even in the New Testament there is necessarily some degree of admixture. Any inspiration or revelation flowing through an incarnate human being will naturally be limited by the capacity of the individual's own knowledge, understanding, and wisdom, the place and time in which he or she lives, and his or her own assumptions and prejudices. There can certainly be no greater form of fundamental ignorance than to assume anything spoken or written by a human being is the “absolute word of God,” however inspired or enlightened the author might be. However ....
Look and see! Some two thousand years later most of us struggle to actually understand the true meaning and message of the Holy Gospel (New Testament) – after all of this time, relatively few, as yet, have come to understand Christ or Buddha, let alone become Christ-like or Buddha-like, and even fewer still have attained Christhood or Buddhahood; as it is, most of Christendom cannot even conceive or believe that not only are we to become Christ-like, but that we are destined to Christhood. The fact is, the god of most of Christianity resembles the god of the Old Testament, the Christian faith becoming degraded by the powerful downward and backwards pull of cosmic ignorance, the demiurge!
What we are witnessing is the struggle of evolution – whether on the material, psychic or spiritual level, and part and parcel of evolution is all of the stress, pressure and resistance to the forward progress. In this regard, we have every reason to study and contemplate the Holy Torah to gain the most complete and intimate knowledge of creative evolution, and the conscious evolution to which we are called in Adonai Yeshua Messiah – from Old to New Testament, and from exoteric to esoteric Christianity, we can clearly observe the process of our own development and evolution, as reflected in the apparent development and evolution of the revelation of the Divine; and here it must be said, as reflected by the doctrines taught in the outer and unspiritual church, still we are laboring to receive the Gospel of Peace in full, and clearly, the revelation of the Divine remains ongoing – for as yet, the Gospel of Truth is rarely known and understood, the Christ Presence and Holy Spirit are rarely embodied in full among us.
It must also be said that if and when we struggle with the Old Testament, or the “god of the Old Testament,” we are, in fact, struggling with ourselves – the violent tendency projected onto God in the unenlightened or dualistic condition remains very active in us! What we struggle with is the *reflection of ourselves* – really, our own self-loathing; recognizing this, perhaps we will seek our own healing and the removal of the violent inclination from within us.
In truth, as yet, few among us rise into the heights of prophetic consciousness as the holy ones in the Old Testament were able to do, let alone to those loftier heights embodied by Yeshua Messiah. Thus, frankly speaking, the Old Testament remains completely relevant to us – after all, we often more resemble the characters we read about in the Old Testament than those we read about in the New Testament who walk in the full power of grace and the Holy Spirit.
In our aspiration to knowledge of God and union with God all Holy Scriptures remain relevant to us, including Holy Scriptures that did not make their way into the Bible.
With this in mind we will begin by looking at the Ten Commandments from a Gnostic perspective