I Appeal to You
... through Bertha Dudde  - 13.01.1960 

7499   Scrutiny of spiritual knowledge .... Calling upon the spirit ....

You ought to think about what you are expected to believe, you ought to examine it, and always call upon God for help that He may enlighten your spirit, that He may give you the understanding and the right power of judgment in order to be able to distinguish truth from error. You should not believe blindly, don’t accept everything presented to you as truth, for God’s adversary is diligently at work because it is in his interest to undermine the truth, to intersperse the truth with error and to lead people into thinking wrongly .... And so it is understandable that it must be checked, for an examination must be made wherever two different opinions are endorsed, because both together cannot be true if they deviate from each other. But you are incapable of conducting such an examination by yourselves as long as you only use your intellect, because the latter can easily be controlled by God’s adversary. First, your spirit must be awakened and then you will not find it difficult to examine spiritual knowledge. Therefore you should always pray for an enlightened spirit first, for bright and clear thoughts and judgment of what you are expected to believe. And you will soon become aware of the fact that not many teachings will stand up to serious scrutiny as soon as it is conducted with a call upon God for illumination .... You will discover contradictions, misguided interpretations, indistinct concepts will confuse your thoughts and distortedly portray the image of God, your Creator and Father of eternity, you will not always be able to reconcile love, wisdom and power with what you are being taught, with what you are expected to believe. And any teaching which casts doubt on any one of these .... love, wisdom or power .... is wrong .... You should always apply the yardstick that God’s nature may not be portrayed distortedly if a doctrine lays claim to truth. However, God’s adversary will always aim to present God in a way that it will be difficult for people to grant Him all their love. Therefore he will make an effort to distort God’s nature, to portray an unclear image of Him and, particularly, let God’s love appear to be doubtful, because people will then stop believing in God and refrain from doing what is the most important in earthly life: to establish a bond with God, which can only be established through love. Everything that is suitable for making you doubt God’s love is the adversary’s activity. And every doctrine portraying God as a merciless Judge Who only wants to punish His living creations is therefore his work .... even if God’s justice is mentioned. God’s love outweighs everything, although God’s nature will always and forever be perfect and, as a result, justice will never be excluded in everything God does or allows to happen. Yet a true doctrine will never exclude God’s love, consequently, one can never speak of eternal damnation either because this contradicts divine love .... Hence the criteria for the credibility of a doctrine can therefore always be applied in relation to what extent God’s love, wisdom and power the doctrine represents .... And this scrutiny can be carried out by a person at any time with God’s support; it is just that the intellect should not deem itself capable of it by itself, for this still forms different judgments for as long as God’s adversary can still influence it, and he will always interfere where the bond with God, the eternal Father, has not been established as yet .... but which will be established when the human being sincerely calls upon Him for enlightenment through the spirit. After all, this is a matter of truth, and everything shall be done so that you humans gain possession of truth, but you must participate through your will to know the truth .... In that case you will also turn to God of your own accord with an appeal to help you to make a distinction between truth and error and to separate them .... and you will live in truth for as long as you walk with God ....

Amen