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As we have seen, the story of Job opens in an unusual manner, the curtains being drawn to reveal a scene in heaven: "Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them." Here the biblical seer openly includes Satan among the "Sons of God", and we are told that he was given permission by God to afflict Job, in order to try his virtue and demonstrate his steadfastness. The Lord is already aware of what the outcome will be, foreknowing that Job will win the victory over Satan.
In this celestial allegory we read a truth known to all esotericists: that even the tempting Angels and the afflicting Angels are part of the divine economy of the universe, and that their activities are subject to cosmic Law. The Bible, as we have it today, speaks occasionally of the angelic hosts and of the Archangels Gabriel, Michael and Raphael; but there are nameless hosts of angelic spirits which, as a matter of historic record, have been correlated by the ancient Chaldeans and Persians with the various attributes of the Most High God and the signs of the Zodiac as expressions of Him. Bel, it is known, is a form of the word Baal, meaning Lord, and referring to the Sun as a living Archangelic Spirit which in turn represents a member of the supreme Trinity. The Chaldeans attributed to Bel the Dragon of the Zodiac, which is the path of the Sun and also of the planets. In Persia the Spirit of the Sun was Mithra, or Mihr, as we learned in our study of the Book of Esther; and among the Gnostics, the Christ also was identified with the Spirit of Light resident in the Sun. Thus the Archangels referred to in the Bible are really the Planetary Spirits-Gabriel, Lord of the Moon; Michael, "the Angel of the Lord," the Lord of the Sun (among the Jews); and Raphael, the Lord of Mercury.
The spirit called "Satan". as we have learned in our previous chapter, is the spirit of Saturn, the planet of sorrow and suffering. As one of the Spirits before the Throne of God, Satan (Saturn) too, is a son of God, and a divine being.
Service and sacrifice are the keywords of attainment both in Heaven and Earth. The celestial Hosts, or Sons of God, evolve just as man does through the outpouring of love in service to the living universe. Each of these shining hosts performs some specific task in connection with the vast workings of nature's economy as we shall find them described in the final chapters of Job. From their exalted places in Heaven they reach down to serve and succor humanity, in addition to their creative activities in the inner worlds without which there could be no phenomenal universe. Chaos would have reigned long since were it not for their beneficent creative ministrations.
The Council in Heaven described in the Prologue of Job pictures something of the varied activity of these shining beings as they seek to illumine and advance mankind. It is this close intermingling of Heaven with Earth, of the celestial with the terrestrial, in divine unity of purpose and design which strikes the most characteristic note of the Bible, the most powerful, the sweetest and the most beautiful chord of the spiritual symphony.
It is only as man awakens to the truth of the oneness of Life which is centered in God (who is in reality both center and circumference of all Life), that the Path of Perfection is opened for him from which he "shall come forth as gold", in the words of Job. Coleridge caught the vision of this great unity when he wrote:
One of the greatest tragedies of modern times is that humanity at large has become careless and incredulous of these heavenly contacts. Despite the fact that the Bible is generally accredited as the supreme manual of spiritual living and that its pages contain numerous instances of the intimate communion between the inhabitants of Heaven and Earth, yet the tremendous importance of this fact is almost entirely disregarded, not alone by the worldly but by the religious also.
Writes the illumined Rudolph Steiner: "It is clearly our duty to receive the birth of Jesus Christ into our hearts, into our souls, that we do not close our eyes to the fearful deterioration that has overtaken the so-called culture of mankind. It is our duty, standing as we do on the ground of Spiritual Science, this Cosmic Conception of the World, so fully to realize all that which indicates decline in human civilization today. We must say with absolutely no reserve: The deliverance of Mankind from a downward evolutionary course depends entirely upon its turning to a revelation which can only come through Spiritual Knowledge. The Work of the Heavenly Powers upon Earth must cease if their further Cosmic evolution is not united with Mankind. The healing of Mankind can only be brought about if a sufficiently large number of souls permeate themselves with what we are trying to say here. For only he who is blind utterly to the cause of these ghastly wars, these world catastrophes, can close his eyes to the fact that we are at the beginning of a process of destruction, and that nothing can bring us out of this process of destruction except something new! This new thing (Paul spoke of) can not be found in or on Earth, it can only come from the Spirit of Christ Truth, from the Christ Life Power."
— Corinne Heline
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