Home Religion and restoration
- This page is part of an ERW course: Home Church.
- By John Eagles, May 18, 2007.
When you believe in God it is logical to also believe that God created the cosmos to become an ideal place. When nature is uninfluenced by man, it always brings itself back into harmony. Sometimes on a smaller scale damage can be done, but on a larger scale the good balance is always restored. For example, wood fires may temporarily cause harm, but after such a fire, new vegetation quickly comes using the burnt organic material as fertilizer. Several tree seeds only sprout after they have gone through such a fire.
In the world of beings with free will it is up to them to live according to God's ideal principles. When free beings choose to disregard the original and ideal principles, the result is conflict, strife and destruction. One of the main laws of the universe is that the smaller entity sacrifices for the larger unit. Parents sacrifice themselves giving their love for their family and in that way, harmony and happiness comes about. But many free beings in the universe have chosen to deny God and try to build a world for and under themselves. People born in later generations inherit the problems and many people are not aware of many of the good internal and spiritual principles that we are supposed to follow.
In human history there was an event called 'fall.' The fall was the fall away from God's ideal. It could happen because God gave freedom to man and to angels. Love has only value when it is given freely, but when there is freedom, it can also be misused by egocentric personalities.
An ideal world of all beings living under original principles has not yet come, but it will come, or God would not be a God of love. We ourselves are largely responsible to learn to live according to God's principles and we are also responsible to change this world into a better one.
Just as there exist principles for an ideal world, so there exist principles for restoring that which is broken. Home Religion is the practice of restoring what got lost so the ideal purposed by God will become reality.
The family of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden stands model for the ideal of man. Their fall away from the ideal describes how human history began in difficulty. History of man is an alternation of events of renewed falls and of gradually restoring a more ideal world.
When you think of yourself reaching a higher degree of unity with the Creator, then this is most of all a process of restoring yourself as an ideal person. As we are to a certain degree products of the past, we inherit not only troubles in society, but also certain ways of loving, thinking, and feeling that make up our personality. To make ourselves to more ideal people, we cannot but go the road of restoration, the restoration of ourselves as men and women as God originally has intended us to be.
Home Religion is the course to restore yourself as ideal man or woman; we could also say as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before they fell.
How does restoration take place? Restoration is actually the same as re-creation. God once created man, and now we have to be re-created. The principles of restoration are the principles of recreation, which are in essence the same as those of original creation.
What is broken must be repaired. The situation of restoration demands first of all that the conditions come back in which fall took place, but now there should be acted in the right way. When certain situations brought you in conflict with a friend and it led you to act in an undesirable way, then this conflict and your way of reacting made you a different person. For example the tendency to argue could have settled to a certain degree in your personality. To overcome this undesirable tendency, the only way to correct it is when there comes again a similar situation in which the first conflict took place, but now you overcome your desire to argue and make war and instead you express forgiveness and love. Then your personality has changed to a certain degree and you have become a different person.
There are several principles of restoration, but here i mention the two main ones. The first principle of restoration is that the past will come back in new situations that are parallel to the the past. This principle working in human history explains why historians found so many parallels in human history. Certain situations keep coming back until finally the problems are restored.
A second important principle of restoration is that the ideal and good situation comes about only after something that was wrong is corrected. Though this may seem quite self-evident, it is nevertheless one of the main principles to understand. We can only make ourselves and this world better when we correct what we or our ancestors did wrong in the past.
In Home Religion we first of all focus on correcting ourselves in the environment of the home, because the home is the place where things went wrong in the past. All the miseries we see in the larger society are a result of what went wrong in homes. It is in the home, in the relation to those nearest to us, that we were influenced to forget our origin and it also in the home that all this can be restored. Religion is first of all an individual endeavor, but because fall took place in relations, correction also can only be done in relations.
