All right. God’s Revolution. Ba-bow. Justice, Community and the Coming Kingdom. You see. Justice, Community and the Coming Kingdom. All right. Let’s see what we got over here. Some more books by this guy, by Eberhard Arnold. Inner Land: A Guide Into the Heart and Soul of the Bible, Why we live in Community, the Early Christians: In Their Own Words, Salt and Light: Living the Sermon on the Mount, the Individual and the World Need, Against the Wind.
Okay. All right. Look at this, “Crumbling World and the God’s Coming Order.” Let’s… Wait a minute. So what is this God’s Coming? Or how old is this? ’97. (silence). Hold on a second.
I’ll make this video short because I heard something outside. The first printing was 1984. The new order fleshed out. The individual and the community, peace and a rule of God. Let’s go to non-violence and the refusal to bear arms. No, no, no, no. World poverty and suffering. See what he gots to say there, 176. World and poverty. There we go, boom.
“Am I guilty? When we speak of a radical social revolution of turning everything upside down, of bringing in the reign of God’s justice, we can only do so if we are deeply convinced that such an upheaval will affect us all quite personally. You and me, every single one of us, as part of humankind. We ourselves have to be thrown over and then put back on our feet. We are all responsible for the social injustice, the human degradation, the wrongs people inflict on each other, both public and private. Each of us bears guilt toward all humankind because we are deaf and blind to their degradation and humiliation.”
I wonder where… They have these dates on the bottom of it. All right. I don’t know what the dates mean. That’s interesting. Yeah. Wow. Okay. I guess this is when he wrote all this stuff, because it’s all around the same time. This book isn’t from… Yeah, all this is all from 1920s, 1915. So, I’m guessing that this old guy, he’s old. Yeah. Eberhard Arnold, they just didn’t publish this book until later.
“Lay down your own life.” Am I guilty? He was basically saying that we’re all guilty for each and every one of our sufferings. Right. If you weren’t suffering. Like what Michael Jackson said, “If you want change in the world, look in the mirror and make a change.” All right. Okay.
“Lay down your own life. We live in poverty and without personal possessions, we do this for love of Christ and for the sake of those who are poorer than we are, the very poorest. There is such an endless amount of misery that wealth and influence are unbearable to anyone living in the love of Christ.” Yeah. Okay.
“Injustice rule in the world today. As long as this continues there will always be poor people.” See, I disagree with that a little bit. There’s many reasons why there’s poor people. Not just because they don’t believe in God or whatever.
“It is idle to ask what we would do if there were no more poor. Even a rigidly enforced social system has not managed to do away with poverty. Therefore, Jesus says, ‘The poor you have with you always. And the Old Testament has it, the poor will always be with you in the land. Yet this love for the poor cannot be the final thing. It must be surpassed by love to God,’ Christ says. You will not always have me with you.’ Matt, 26, 11.
On the other hand, we must not let our love for God cause us to neglect love to the poor. Out of love to God we should love our neighbor. If we see your brother or sister in need and say, ‘God will help you,’ and give nothing, though you have this world’s goods, where is your love to God? James 2:15 and 16.”
I like that. I really do like that. I’m not really with the religious part of everything. Right. Because that can be interpreted way too many different ways, but let’s cut through the meat right there. And what he says is… I mean, that’s cool. I liked that way of thinking. I really liked that because he’s like, if you got all the money in the world and you see somebody in need and you’re like, “Well, God’s going to help you,” but you, yourself do nothing, then you’re not a godly person. Because God gives you the gift to be able to help others.
So maybe you are that messenger of God that you’re telling this other person, “God will help you.” I don’t know if that made sense. Right. In that split second of time, you have the power of God because you can help that person. So by you saying, “God will help you,” and you doing nothing, then you are refusing the faith of God or the luxuries of God or whatever you want to say. That was pretty interesting. I liked that.
So, we’ll get back to the God’s Revolution. And was it, pain and suffering or something like that? Poverty and suffering. I get this, but it’s not bad, not bad. You know what I’m saying? I would never really thought about reading it in the beginning, but yeah. This is part of the reason why we’re doing this.
So, when you get a box, right, of random books, you just look through it. You never know what you’re going to find. It’s like life is like a box of chocolates. Right. You never know what you going to get.