The Ultimate Fear and Its Remedy

This was taken from Joel's lecture "0506A Past and Present Civilizations"

"Because at the most, that is what the middle-aged person is expecting: five, ten, fifteen, twenty. And just to have the hope of that is quite enough. And what we're doing in talking about bombs or talking about wiping them out in any other way is just denying them that extra five or ten or fifteen, and that's all that the fear is about. There's only one way in which that fear can be eliminated. If you really catch a glimpse of God as spirit, you really catch a glimpse of the fact that man is made in the image and likeness of God, therefore man is spiritual.

Or you catch the glimpse that God is the life of the universe, therefore God is your life—your life's indestructible. It makes no difference where they blow your body up; your life goes right on and forms a new one. It makes no difference if we come to a period of some sickness or age and for a moment have a fright as we leave this body. We find out very, very quickly that God is the life of man. Man is made in the image and likeness of God. Therefore, the life of God is the life of man. The soul of God is the soul of man, and as God is indestructible, so is man.

And so whether he comes to the end of his so-called structural period when he's thirty or when he's ninety, it doesn't change the fact that his life is everlasting and it's going to continue, and it's going to continue in a progressive state. When we lose the fear of death, we have lost the fear of everything that can harm this universe because the first fear that humans suffer from is the fear of sin, but the ultimate fear is the fear of death. As long as that fear of death persists, we will be proving that we have not yet discovered the nature of God, and we will be in the same position as our ancestors who also did not discover the nature of God."