Two Sides of the Coin of Authority

Every coin has two sides, yet it remains one. What are the two sides of the “coin of authority?”

Jesus saw that a man who plays the role of absolute authority, or God, a priori, plays the same role as the man who plays Satan, for both roles veil a grasp for power. When accused by the Pharisees of casting out devils by the prince of devils, He does not deny this, but answers, “And if I by Be-el-ze-bub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them out?” Then, having spoken of the house divided if Satan casts out Satan, He adds, “But if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you.” Jesus says if. He will not admit to playing either the role of the devil or of God, saying on another occasion, “Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, that is, God.”

We as humans cannot condone anyone who makes a claim to Godhood; to absolute authority. Preston Harold continues…

Jesus recognized that both the Satanic and Messianic concepts conceal the will to express absolute power, and that the truth bearer who loses himself in his own revelation, believing himself to be or allowing himself to become deity, poses such threat as the sanity or logic associated with Satan could never pose. He showed in his drama that the man who allows himself to be called the Son of God, God in the flesh, or Messiah, will not be tolerated, that Judaism would not in truth tolerate any man’s fulfillment of prophecies regarding the Christ as these are set forth in the Scriptures. Judaism could not in Jesus’ day, nor can it now, tolerate its own Messianic concept, if actualized, any more than Christianity can tolerate the Pauline elaboration of it.

Yet Jesus revealed that we are all endowed with the very being of God, and that that being never allows us to truly be lost from sight:

Jesus refused to play either the role of God or of the devil. He was divinely human, and so must have been that first “gigantic one” who could not extricate himself from the role of God, intolerable, and thus was murdered only to return again and again, a promise and reminder in man’s mind, as parent truth in Homo sapiens led others to speak the same words, “Ani hu.”

Until next time, peace…