- 24 - • the Divinely created spheres of progress in which the fallen spirits are led back to God, • the enveloping the spirits in matter – these were as difficult for the people of those times to understand as for the people of today. The epistles of the Apostles likewise have little to say about the subject, for these truths lend themselves but poorly to instruction by means of letters, and could be brought home to the faithful only by oral presentation. Nevertheless, Paul at least hints at these truths in several passages of his writings, even if you fail to understand them because they no longer fit in with your religious views. Thus, he writes in his epistle to the Romans: Romans 8: 19-24: ‘For all Creation awaits with yearning the moment when they will shed their material bodies as children of God. For they are subjected to the impermanence of matter, not of their own will, but by order of Him who ordained their subjection in the hope that they will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that to this hour all of Creation sighs and awaits the pangs of a new birth. And not only they, but we also, who already possess the first gift of communication with God's spirits, even we ourselves sigh inwardly, waiting to be released from our bodies.’ From what I have already taught you, you know the relationships that are being referred to. In this passage Paul says that the whole of Creation is waiting with yearning to be delivered from the bondage of material existence, meaning thereby the stones, plants, herbs, flowers, animals and men. • Such ‘yearning’ is possible only in a being in which a spirit is incarnated. So, throughout Creation there are spirits, incorporated in matter of different kinds. They are the once rebellious spirits, which in the beginning resided in glory and splendour as God’s obedient children and as His holy spirits, but then became disobedient and were therefore exiled from the Father’s house. • Exiled though they be, they remain God’s children to this day. They long to return to the Father's home and strive to free themselves of the material bodies in which they are confined, as during the birth pangs a child struggles to escape from the confines of its mother’s womb. These spirits are not in the material bodies of their own will, but it was God who so embodied them in His mercy, in order that by trial and purification they might be saved. All material beings long for this salvation, even though they may not know the way to it nor the goal, and they pine for the day on which, purified and freed from their material bodies, they shall once more be called the children of God. This longing abides, above all, in the people who believe in God, for although they, like the early Christians, may be in daily communion with the spirit messengers from their Father’s home and in them have received the first gift and a foretaste of the kingdom of God, they still have not attained to that kingdom so long as they live in the flesh.
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