Question:
What does this mean? “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”
Does it mean that anything you ask God for, He will give to you? And the knocking part, is He referring to The Kingdom of Heaven opening to you while you are on Earth? Seeking refers to curiosity, so is He telling us Christians to be curious creatures?
Answer:
To access the true meaning of this message, we first have to develop the right concept of “ask, knock, and seek”. These do not mean petitioning or uttering a succession of earthly words to request the fulfillment of a specific desire, but rather it is alluding to the conditions that must first be spiritually fulfilled if we are to meet with a successful response from the Laws of God in Creation. To make this real, let us use a physical example of how this principle manifests.
If a farmer desires an orchard, how will he seek, ask, and knock for it? If he walks upon an arable field and, with all the fervor of his being, petition Nature to produce a rich harvest of apple trees, will anything happen? No,it will not. If he recite scripture, call on the name of Jesus, and recite the Lord’s Prayer before repeating his request, will anything happen?No,it will not. No matter what antics he employs to lend weight to his request, and no matter how genuine and pure his soul may be, nothing will ever happen. He can ask, but it shall not be given him; he can seek, but he shall never find; and he can knock, but it shall not be opened unto him! Why not?
To achieve the response of a successful harvest, the immutable and perfect Laws of Nature demand that he, first of all, discover and then adjust to their preconditions. Thus, to achieve a harvest, the farmer must first learn the proper science of farming and then adjust all his efforts to comply with its strict conditions; only then will the Laws of Nature serve him and produce a rich harvest. Never before. If he neglects even one step in the process of this exact science either through willful neglect, ignorance, or indolence, then no harvest will come to him no matter how hard he tries. Only when he learns the immutable and unchangeable Natural Laws—and obeys them will he achieve success. In this sense, to “ask, seek, and knock” means to understand and use the perfect Natural Laws in the right way, i.e., to adjust to the conditions in which they operate. Only when the farmer does this is he “asking”, “seeking”, and “knocking” properly, for which Nature will respond by giving, opening, and delivering to him a harvest.
As this happens in physical things, so does it also apply to the spiritual laws operating in Creation that govern our connection to the Almighty. The entire spiritual and physical realms from the highest heights to the lowest depths are comprised of a firmly-knit fixed system of immutable, infallible, and eternally unchangeable Laws that have their origin in God the Father. Like irrevocable railway lines, these Laws penetrate everything and oversee the development and manifestation of every happening. Consequently, these perfect Laws have preconditions that must always be met if the human spirit is to find success both spiritually and physically.
One of the greatest ways man has harmed himself and hampered his development is through the false idea that the Almighty can change, modify or bend His Laws to perform this or that deed. This leads to the attitude among “believers” that proof of His greatness is found, not in compliance with a fixed system, but in how He can bend and break the Laws of Nature! The “believer” considers this great, but he fails to see how this idea actually expresses disbelief in the Perfection of the Father, for where there is change there is no perfection. Hence, what he is saying through this false idea is that the Almighty is so imperfect, arbitrary, and inconsistent in His ways, and lacks so much foresight that He has to adopt a “modify and change Laws as you go strategy” just to effectively rule the Universe! The same way an arbitrarily acting earthly ruler modifies and changes laws just to serve the unpredictable host of his ever-changing desires. Viewed rightly, this belief is actually blasphemy against Almighty God! Thus, a contradiction arises whereby the person who calls himself a “believer” often becomes the chief perpetuator of disbelief in the Perfection of His Will. Imagine that!
God is enthroned in unapproachable distances, so between Him and the human spirit are immense distances that cannot be traversed by a human being even in its highest development. However, these unfathomable distances comprising vast realms are filled and bridged by the network of the Laws of God that penetrate and animate the whole body of Creation, the same way the network of nerves penetrate and animate the whole physical body.This analogy suggests a different concept of omnipresence, which is that God is spiritually accessible from every part of Creation through this network of Divine Laws; the same way every internal part of the physical body can have a connection to the brain only through a network of nerves, but never personally. It follows that when man is seeking, he can only find a nerve path connecting him with God. Through this path, the necessary power then trickles down and initiates movement toward fulfillment of the said volition.
With this picture comes an expanded understanding of “ask, seek, and knock”. If man can only have access to these Laws directly (but not God Himself) and must receive fulfillment through them, then “asking, seeking, and knocking” is a figurative rendering of how to adjust to these Laws in order to successfully receive the granting of wishes. These Laws are neutral and do not condition the granting of wishes based on a distinction between good or bad, but they impartially carry out their activity based on who meets their preconditions. For example: if a person with evil intent (who nevertheless understands the science of farming) decides to plant a whole field of poison ivy for the misery of his fellowman, it will be granted him so long as he fulfills all the preconditions of Nature.But if a person with good intent (who is ignorant of the science of farming) decides to plant a whole field of roses for the joy of his fellowman, it will be denied him so long as he fails to fulfill all the preconditions of Nature. Both farmers were “asking, seeking, and knocking” and both received their reward. In the former case, he reaped a successful harvest of poison ivy; and in the latter case, he reaped an empty field mirroring his ignorance. In this, we see that Nature does not condition fulfillment based on the nature of intent, but rather the proper fulfillment of strict preconditions, i.e., adjusting to its Laws.
The granting of wishes stated above must not be misconstrued to imply the encouragement of endless purely personal wishing intended to serve this or that special purpose made of selfish desires. That is not what is intended for even the concept of “wishes” is, first and foremost, a spiritual concept. A wish spiritually is an impetus from the intuition to realize a high aim that, containing furthering values, will bring benefit and value to all concerned. In everything that arises from the guided intuition, there is only blessing and gain; but in the case of wishes infected by the overdeveloped intellect, any personal gain will always be limited and temporary, and in addition will bring some harmful side-effects to oneself and one’s neighbor.
As the aforementioned example with the farmers occur in observable processes with immutable physical laws, so also does it manifest in nonearthly happenings with spiritual laws. Physical laws are the offspring of Spiritual Laws, like children are the offspring of their parents. The principle is the same, yet the manifestation is slightly different, just like the DNA of a parent and child will match but their outer appearance will be slightly different. And just like you can identify physical resemblances despite slight differences in forms, so will a knowing one identify the unity of laws despite the slight difference in their physical and spiritual manifestations! Therefore, in the final conclusion, “ask, seek, and knock” implies the necessity to recognize the immutable preconditions of the Laws of God that govern Creation, to the adjustment of which the human spirit is guaranteed that it will be “given unto him, he will find, and it shall be opened”.
However, despite the neutrality of these Laws that harvest alike what is good and bad based on the nature of man’s adjustment, since these Laws issue from God,and as God is the Power that activates them and is Himself Living Love, it follows that these Laws produce their most powerful effect when the human spirit is motivated by a pure love and uses them with conscious knowledge.
But it just here that everything falls apart. Man has some knowledge of physical laws, yet he is largely ignorant of spiritual laws. Different enlightened ones and prophets came to teach him about these spiritual laws, but he never really listened. Finally, the Son of God Jesus came with new knowledge about spiritual laws. However, despite thisMission of Jesus, there remained vast gaps in mankind’s understanding of these Laws of God because mankind’s indolence and vanity caused a weak and narrow interpretation of the lofty teachings, and in some cases even introduced some errors. A consequence of this spiritual limitation is that the parables are regarded as kindly moral teachings instead of Cosmic Laws and World happenings embracing the spiritual and material worlds. In addition, under the influence of the overdeveloped intellect, man now regards as inerrant and directly attributes to the Son of God those accounts that, written only many years following the death of Christ, were drawn from the flawed memories of the imperfect human mind and transmitted to posterity only at second or third hand! If man earnestly asks, seeks, and knocks, he will soon discover that the term “Word of God”, in this case, can perhaps only be attributed to that Word directly spoken or written personally by an Envoy of God without any intermediaries. The operative word “of”, denotes directly by or from. However, since Jesus Himself did not write any words then, if we wish to be honest, all written texts at best can only be regarded as accounts. Hence, the statement: the gospel according to. This should not cause us to belittle the statements thereby, for that would be wrong and going to the other extreme. But rather, it should prompt us to approach it more objectively!
In all this, humanity’s lukewarm asking, seeking, and knocking has reaped a lukewarm harvest of misunderstanding and limited knowledge. Even this is fulfillment. However, to rectify this, to fill the vast gaps in humanity’s understanding, to intervene helpingly in the spiritual need, to further extend the knowledge of Creation and the Laws of God that seamlessly connects this world and the beyond into an indivisible unified whole of perfectly operating Laws…a newAct of Grace has been given mankind through the work,
“In the Light of Truth, The Grail Message” by Abd-ru-shin, the main work of the Alexander Bernhardt Publishing Company.
Through this work, man is given the key to the complete recognition of all preconditions of the Laws of God, and well as all knowledge that will complete his understanding of every process in the Universe hitherto unknown; the proper adjustment to which is tantamount to “ask, seek, and knock”.
~Ikenna Q. Ezealah
Foundation for Ascent 